Artwork for DigiPak: Inspiration & Convention

This is the cover artwork for Everything Everything's single Kemosabe. I will be using a similar photographic editing style, however continuing the motif of triangle shapes and having one on the cover also. It is a simplistic edit, taking two images in centre frame of the same composition (CU, MCU, etc) and layering one on top of another. This is done professionally by an actual photographer or graphic designer so do not expect mine to be exceptionally comparable in quality. The use of blocked editing rather than subtle touches to the images endorses a more striking effect, visually, on the audience. An additional reason for using the Kemosabe artwork as artistic influence is that Everything Everything and Alt-J fall into the same genre.

Alternatively, this is St. Vincent & David Byrne's collaboration album titled 'Love This Giant'. The  artwork for this album is unique, showing peculiar alterations to the facial features of the musicians.This was not done with photo editing software, but with prosthetic materials that were attached to their faces. The obscurity of the image gives a dramatic and surreal effect to the audience.  Despite not being in the same genre as Alt-J, this duet have revolutionized modern music, reinventing brass bands in music, alongside contemporary rock, similarly to the way that Alt-J have shown innovation in their sound and hybrid of genres.  The artwork portrays a domestic-like simple portrait, with very minor details obscured (the cleft of Bryne's chin and the potrusion on St. Vincent's face). This then causes a double take of the audience, making them look again in case their eyes have tricked them to see that this is in fact work of prosthetics, not a trick of the eye. This is similar to the content of the album: incorporating brass into a rock duet causes the same 'double-take' effect of shock.
To conform to similar techniques that these two examples show, I need to produce artwork with obvious points of image manipulation, yet with the title and name of the record as well as the name of the artist to be accentuated so that audiences are able to see the name of the album. The obscure nature of the artwork will parallel with the abstract technique used in the music video which is a convention of the indie , looking at creative methods rather than pop culture in music which would focus on advertising the consumerism and wealth of the artist. Another convention of artwork for albums is that they tend to also feature on the cover of the booklet that comes with the digipak, therefore will feature the cover art on the front cover of the booklet. 


This is the cover of Toro Y Moi's debut album 'Causers Of This' released in 2010. Toro Y Moi is contained in the synth/chillwave genre similarly to that of Alt-J, therefore can use this cover art as another example of conventional to my genre. This cover art again has a surreal visual element of what seems as random layering of images of water and other textures. However, this layering of these water images denote the depth and timbre of the sound of the music. 

UPDATE (1th February 2013):
The common element two of the three of these album covers is that they include geometric shapes and obscurities. Considering this, I decided to continue research in geometric art used in album covers, as well as looking at some existing artwork, such as Leif Podjasky used in previous posts, and found that geometry is common and very basic. Additionally, the whole concept of the title of my song 'Tessellate' is based around triangles and shapes, therefore giving my album a self title from the name of that song, then I could used geometry on the cover of the album. This would consequently going against the convention of including a picture of the artist on the cover, yet this was no matter as many musicians have done this - it isn't necessarily a convention of my genre, for example the current artwork for Alt-J's album An Awesome Wave is a texture with numerous colours, including no shot of the artist. 

This brought me to the problem of considering a name for the artist. After much consideration of titles with connotations of shapes, originality and sounds, I came to the conclusion that the name 'Navajo' complies. Navajo insinuates originality as the Navajo people are considered as a tribe from the descendants of Native Americans.  This originality accompanies the idea of the innovation of the music. Navajo artwork is also famous for using geometric shapes in sequences, complying with the idea of tessellation. Finally, I like the abstract nature of the word and the pronunciation that is indefinite - everyone pronounces the word differently. 

Here is some album artwork that follows the concept of geometrics as album art from The Strokes, Hot Chip, Radiohead, Caribou, Animal Collective and STRFKR :