Album Cover Design

NO IMAGES FROM THE INTERNET ARE TO BE USED FOR THIS ASSIGNMENT! NO IMAGE MANIPULATION WHATSOEVER. ALL CONTENT MUST BE CREATED ORIGINALLY IN ADOBE ILLUSTRATOR AND/OR PHOTOSHOP.

You have been contacted by a major media outfit (Sony Music, RCA, Amazon Digital, Virgin Records, etc) who is expecting a new release of a top-selling recording artist's next album. They are in need of a creative individual who can capture the essence and imagery for the production for such a product, and your name came up. This means not only good money but serious accolades and bragging rights. In some respects, your visual creation tells the story with pictures where the musicians tell the story with their songs. And, usually, your artwork gets splattered all over t-shits, posters, stickers, buttons, and maybe even a video game (anything' is possible these days). So, to say that this is a BIG DEAL is sort of an understatement.

But, first things first. In order to capture this so-called essence, it is important to actually know a little something about this musical entity. Questions you should ask are:

• Is it a band or an individual?
• What style of music do they perform?
• Does this musical entity have a logo?
• Do they stick to a certain sort of color theme?
• Is the album considered a "concept album"
  • Pink Floyd: The Wall^[2]
  • The Who: Tommy^[2]
  • Queensryche: Operation: Mindcrime^[23
  • Mannheim Steamroller: Fresh Aire I, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
  • The Fugees: The Score
  • Lauryn Hill - The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill

 These are just some considerations regarding your mindset when constructing design work to put the musician's words and music into a visual medium.

1. Sketch of album cover work (logo / thumbnail)
2. You need to create a label for the record itself (you will need to research this yourself to find out what size it should be).
3. A larger sketch of your album cover work (the rough)
4. A sample of the musician's lyrics or a youtube video of their music, in order to support your design's inspiration (send me a link via email)
   
   Now: There's the Photoshop way and the Illustrator way to set this up (depending on which application you choose....or, you might use both).
   1. According to Template.net, "the standard album cover size for LPs is about 31.43 cm square - or...12.275" x 12.275." This size provides enough space to get the vinyl album in and out of the album cover and a large canvas to fully display the album cover artwork. Nowadays, 12-inch vinyl LPs can hold around 30 minutes of audio per side." So, in Photoshop, you would need to set up your image so that it is 12.275 x 12.275 (inches) with 300 dpi resolution
      
      
      
      
   2. In Adobe Illustrator, you would set it up like so (because Illustrator is resolution independent - which means resolution has little meaning to Illustrator)
      
      
      
      
   3. When this assignment is completed, there should be four artboards that contain your work.
      1. Sketches of your album cover ideas/designs
      2. The Album Cover work (the front side)
      3. The opposite of the Album Cover (the back side)
      4. The vinyl record LP label
         
         
   4. JUST A REMINDER: NO IMAGES FROM THE INTERNET ARE TO BE USED FOR THIS ASSIGNMENT! NO IMAGE MANIPULATION WHATSOEVER. ALL CONTENT MUST BE CREATED ORIGINALLY IN ADOBE ILLUSTRATOR AND/OR PHOTOSHOP.