cd covers.

Here, I researched some album cover to see what makes a good album cover. The similarites, differences and what I personally found worked on an album cover. Typing in 'the greatest album covers' into google lead me to this site: http://rateyourmusic.com/list/fedderedder/rolling_stones_100_greatest_album_covers this site had a list of 100 iconic album covers which I looked through.

The first thing I noticed about all of theses covers was that they were all of a simple composition, there was nothing to busy about the composition which meant there was nothing to distract from the album name and artist (if it was on the cover).

This simple composition is something to think about when designing my own cover, simple compositions are easier to remember than more complicated ones because there is less to look at, I think this works with an album cover because then instead of picking up on all the small details the words on the cover are then clearly displayed and nothing else distracts you from them.

Colour seems to be an important factor in creating an album cover contrasting colours between the text and actual image have been used for example, on The Clash, London Calling, album cover pink and green have been used to contrast with the black and white of the image underneath, and on Depeche Mode, A Broken Frame, red and yellow have been used to contrast with the grey of the sky.

However on the other album cover the magority of the titles, artist names and any other text seems to be black or white which contrasts with almost every other colour on the album, or blends with the colours on the album to make the text seem part of the image.

Differences between the albums I found were little because of how simple the compositions are, the covers also seem to have similar patterns in the cover that lead you to either the main subject--the majority of which are people, or they lead your eyes diagonally across the cover and toward the text.