PLANNING - Digipak: Front Cover Conventions

Generic conventions of an album cover:

• A consistent house style with 2/3 colours used.
• A big and bold artist name.
• A smaller font used for the album name.
• A key image which fills the entire cover.

After identifying the typical codes and conventions of generic album covers, I then looked more closely at different genres: Alternative Rock, Heavy Metal and Solo Artists.

Alternative Rock:

• A consistent house style of colours, fonts and sizes.
• A simplistic colour scheme of 1/2 colours used.
• A simplistic design on a plain background.
• A key image, usually the only image on the page.
• The only text on the page is the name of the band and the title of the album.
• The name of the band is the biggest text on the page, however it is not oversized.
• The name of the album is a smaller font size.

Heavy Metal:

• A big, bold and oversized text of the band name, centred at the top of the cover.
• The album name is of a smaller font size than the band name and is located underneath the band name.
• A colour scheme of more than 2/3 colours.
• The colours used are strong, loud colours such as black, red, grey and brown.
• The key image is quite dark, mysterious and scary.

Solo Artists:

• A simplistic colour scheme.
• A simplistic design.
• The artist's name is the biggest text on the cover and can easily be identified, attracting the target audience to the name of the artist rather than the name of the album. This could suggest that the artist is confident as being well recognised and are able to promote their album by their name only.
• There is only one image. The key image is of the artist themselves against a plain background.
• The camera shot used is a mid shot of the artists top half of their body.