Album Covers Work

A: Look at a selection of album covers (minimum of ten, CD or vinyl), maybe from your own, your parents or a friends collection, or online - the more variety in genre, style, decade etc the better. Make notes in answer to the questions below:
1. What are the typical features that an album cover has? Make a list of all the elements they have in common.
- Name of Artist/Band
- Name of Album
- Debut albums tend to have a picture of the band or artist
- 4th album or so of well known established artists can have more obscure images, not neccessarily of the band
- If not a picture then mostly an unconventional, obscure image that is eye-catching
- A colour scheme throughout the cover (front, spine and back), usually bright colours or striking picture to make it recognisable and eye-cathcing
- Either a recognisable font always associated with band/artist or sticking to the colour scheme
- Track List
- Barcode
- Legal/institutional info
- Web address

2. How would you categorise the covers in front of you? Are there any other ways of distinguishing between them other than generically?
- Hip Hop and R'n'B covers tend to have large, usually sexual image, of the artist
- Bands are more likely to go for more alternative covers without an image of the band
- Debut albums have a large image of the band/artist to promote them
- More established artists don't need to have the large image of the band/artist
- The audience, old or young
- Era of the album cover

3. Album covers serve many different functions. What do you think these are (ie what is their purpose?)
- A marketing tool to promote the band or artist
- Introducing an iconic image or logo of the band that will become recognisable
- Give an idea of the sort of music
- Make it stand out on the shelf so that the fans and audience will buy it

B: Choose one album cover out of your selection. It might be a particular favourite, or one that is particularly visually interesting. Prepare deconstruction notes of the cover (back, front, inside sleeve).
I chose to deconstruct David Bowie's 6th(?) album, Diamond Dogs released in 1974. I chose this album cover because it is very visually interesting with quite a shocking and definitely eye-catching image of Bowie on the cover. The album is a concept album based on Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four and Bowie's own glam-tinged vision of a post-apocolyptic world.

The cover features Bowie as a half-man, half-dog grotesque, painted by Belgian artist Guy Paellaert, with two women with fat pig bodies in gold bikinis behind him and an almost desolate-looking city in the background (the link to the post-apocolyptic world). The original artwork of the cover was actually banned as the original vinyl image showed the dog's genitalia. The cover image is now a gatefold sleeve and therefore a more classic and less controversial image of David Bowie is on the back with the institutional information and the track listing.

Unlike most album covers recently, Bowie does not have an ongoing font for the artist name on the cover, however the font does tie in with another one of his albums, Aladdin Sane, and the now very iconic lightning bolt. Therefore, the Diamond Dogs album cover does not have any images that are continuous throughout his albums, apart from the shocking and unconventional images that Bowie was well known for.

The colour scheme is mostly yellow with the tracklisting in yellow and the image predominantly yellow, brown and orange in the image of the desolate kind of waste land. Therefore, there is an obviously strong relationship between the image and the concept of the album. This is similar to most of Bowie's albums as the album, and Bowie as an artist was mainstream but well known for his eccentric images and outfits.