Choosing & Creating Our Album Cover

These are our two chosen photographs for our album cover we selected from the shoot. We knew we wanted a bold star image style portrait, which would dominate the frame. These are the two we felt best which best fitted what we wanted to bring across to the audience and had the most potential. The first high-key image we felt the detail, composition & eye-cntact worked extremely well, but did feel if we were to choose to use this image we would need to crop the image closer from the left to only reveal half of his face. The second slightly low-key image we felt the soft shadows shown on one-side of the face worked well. We wanted to experiment with different idea's we had, this one as created by reducing the light from one of the soft boxes to create these shadows.  

Fonts

After researching and looking at potential fonts, we have decided these fonts were ones which we felt would work well with the type of genre of our music video. We wanted to gather a  variety of different fonts to try with our advert & digipak, which we can then take to select them down to a chosen best font.

Above are some examples of fonts we have looked at and then tried on our album cover. We felt we needed to try some fonts on our album cover choice before selecting a final choice, this was we wanted to see & experiment with different looks. Below is our final font choice upon our album cover, the font we chose is the 'Nixie One'. We selected this simplistic font against the bold star image portrait as it works very well for both the promotion of our star & album.

Magazine Cover

This is a front cover of 'The Clash' magazine showing the artists James Blake. We feel this is similar to the type of the representation we want our artists to bring across. I feel the way he is shown to stand out upon the yellow background works extremely well, along with the central composition of the photograph/front cover. From this front cover he is shown as a dominant character from the way both him & the title dominates the frame/cover, with the main focus upon him. 

Although this magazine does not have any specific genre, we feel this is the best magazine our artists image would look best in. We would like the same image as James Blake is represented through this magazine cover/advert. As a lot of other magazines & front covers I have looked at targets either Hip-Hop or Rock genre's.

Analysing Magazine Adverts

When looking and researching music magazines I noticed that they are mostly Rock & Hip-Hop genres. I decided to look at both different types of magazine adverts to compare them against each other. The first magazine I looked at is Kerrang which there type of genre is Rock.

All the Kerrang front covers I have looked at are all very similar to each other, this is shown through the title, colour, photographs and layout of the front cover. All of their front covers I have looked at all include the bold yellow headings against the red background along with the bold white title, this helps their magazine be noticed & stand out from others. Another thing I noticed from all of their magazines front covers is the big bold start image photographs, this occurs in mostly all of the front covers, with the central composition this is too draw your attention to the artist. This is also placed with a bold yellow slogan or name so the audience links that with the artist, such as the ones shown above of Linkin Park & You Me At Six.

From the two magazines front covers, it represents both the artists and their bands as very powerful & dominant. This is shown through the size & composition of the photograph, which also shows to readers what type of magazine genre it is. When studying different front covers of Kerrang I have seen that their target is to produce this star image of the artist to represent them in a way they want to. I feel a lot of their targets in the peruse & represent the artists as powerful, dominant & 'in you're face' again from the size & composition of their photograph.