Music Booklet Cover Design
Class: Graphic Design Fundamentals, Summer 2021
PROJECT OVERVIEW
The music booklet cover project is to use expressive typography and match it with the mood the artist portrays through a song.
The music booklet cover project is to use expressive typography and match it with the mood the artist portrays through a song.
I take the portion from the song that said: “[t]his that 82 degrees. Got the water to my knees. Out here swinging with the trees on the beach…” as the main theme for the cover for the music booklet. In this process, I used mind maps to see possible ideas or keywords I could use. Then, I start sketching according to the chosen words or ideas that I liked.
I was interested in playing around with handwritten typeface because it gave me more freedom with shapes and its placements. I also looked through the idea of travelling and retro as it gave me memories of going to the beach with my family.
During this process, I choose the sketches from the brainstorming process and started working on the ideas that could work as the drafts for the cover. The main three themes I went for were the handwritten fonts around circular shapes on the first page, the ocean theme on the second and third pages, and retro ideas with cassettes on the second and third pages.
Through comparison of the song and the sketches, I really like the third sketch with a star on it as shown above. The idea of playing around with pool toys from top view perspective gave me the opportunity to pay with handwritten typeface and bright colours that represented summer.
After making the first draft, I realized that the name of the artist did not fit with the flow of the overall cover and was hard to read. The chosen colours and two-dimensional version were also not strong enough to pop the pool toys out.
For the final cover, I found a solid colour palettes for the project that communicates summer with bright colours and the ocean blue as shown above. I worked with the placement of the artist’s name to make it more cohesive and unite the cover design together. Lastly, I made pool toys look more three dimensional to make them really stand out comparing to the water pattern.
The most challenging part of the project is finding the common theme I wanted to go for the rest of the project. During the brainstorming process, the lack of information on the artist and the song leads me to thinking too much outside the box that leads to complication when decisions need to be made. Since the main theme that I got was summer; different group od listeners may interpretate the theme differently than I did. I slowly needed to narrow down my ideas by cutting those that do not communicate summer and other hidden meanings surrounding the same theme. Once I started to understand more about the song and the genre itself, it helped with my decision making.
I would say the overall project went very well! I got the chance to work on my graphic design skills on an interesting project that I have not done in while. With more developed skills and experience in graphic design, I was able to create a piece that draws attention from listeners and them understanding what the song is about. The portion that I am the proudest is coming up with the theme of the cover. The top view with the pool toys successfully communicates summer and the genre of music that the song portrays.