THE PROBLEM
This was a class project in which we needed to create a record album cover. I chose to create a totally new album for a friend - a country artist who takes classic country songs and puts some modern flare on them.
MY SOLUTION
I combined photography and illustrations to create an album cover that had an old-timey feel but with pops of bright color.
FONT For the title, I used a bold, retro font that was thick enough to put the color inside on sleeve, and would stand out on the pattern on the label. The secondary font was a good contrast, as it is a much thinner serif.
COLOR I started the color scheme with the brown, knowing I wanted the main cover to be dark and dirty like old country albums. Then I pulled the other colors and the abstract designs from my research on 70s psychedelic art. The blue is the most toned-down of those colors, so I used that to separate the footnotes on the back of the cover.
I was inspired by the Blue Man Group beat drums and how they splashed color around while they played, and I wanted to add in that vibe of having visual colors adding to otherwise fairly simple performances. The first version of the cover had water splashes at the base of her feet to add some color to her darkened, desaturated photo, but it felt too busy, so I moved them to the back sleeve which added color and sectioned off the lower hierarchy.
