Ancillary - Cover Designs and Ideas

After drafting a few different interpretations of what our album artwork could look like, we set about combining the aspects of each that worked best to create the best cover we could. We had to consider the conventions of album artwork whilst making these decisions, along with the representation of our artist and most importantly, her music. Amanda has a very unique, independent style and therefore we had to capture this in the presentation of her music just as we had done in the music video we created for "This Beauty."
Below is a rough sketch of our finished design:

We aim to design this to ahigher standard on Photoshop at a later date, where we should be able to refine the font used for the word "Heartwood" and improve it's overall appearance. We discussed wanting to make the cover look very natural and handmade to reflect Amanda's style, but also to keep it looking professional and of a high standard. Amandas name is written in a unique font meant to emulate the "red string of fate" theme that runs throughout our video. depending on our final designs for the back cover and the inserts, this thread may continue from her name and run throught the album.

We had quite a few different ideas drawn up by seperate members of the group, each of them accuarately representing aspects of Amanda Rogers' artist identity but all focusing on different features that they saw within her style and music.

 

 

For each of these seperate ideas, we focused on bothe the typography of the font's used and the iconograohy. We decided as a group, with input from people who had watched our completed music video, that our most iconic feature in the video is the red heart and string, and the shot at the hand of the heart being held in our Amandas hands. For this reason, we felt that we had to include both of these in the album, if not on the front cover then at least inside or as a motif.

 

Along with this, we felt that even though conventions of album covers show that new, unknown artists tend to feature on the front covers to create conection between the music and artist, the connection of music and ideas was more important for us to focus on. it is for this reason that only one of the designs above shows Amanda, yet still mainly focuses on setting and location. The second idea was ruled out quickly, as whilst we felt it could reflect the artistic nature of Amandas work, it didn't fully represent the concept behind the album and "This Beauty".

 

Hopefully, with this idea in mind, the rest of the album design can now be based around it, along with the poster advertising the album in which the cover must be a prominent feature.