Album cover analysis

This is an album cover from the popular singer Adele. Her music concentrates on her extensive range of vocals and emotions she portrays through her songs. 

To reflect the genre, the album cover is a close up of her face looking down, suggesting a melancholy vibe to it. Although she has obviously has her face made up for the shot, she looks natural from the positioning of her hand pushing her hair back. The plain grey background ensures all attention is drawn to the singer and also creates a dull but sincere feel. The colour scheme of a black and white filter indicates a soul, neutral theme but the shadowy element of it connotes an underlying, darker theme which is brought out in her songs. She is not made out to be glamorous or bold like a pop singer, but subtly attractive in a more understated way. There is no evidence of other music composition like instruments, so that it is obvious with the bold title 'ADELE' she is the credit taker for the album.

This album style would be ideal for an independent singer. Her videos are very much uniform with the cover: they share a black and white colour scheme with close ups throughout.

The majority of the time is of her face singing the words to create a connection with the audience that they are getting a close performance of her emotional lyrics. This is ideal for a soul-singer genre. This will not be too great for our video as we would like to include a bit of creativity and explore with different camera shots and include a storyline. Having a lot of face to camera time gives the person credit to the song, which would be unrealistic.

This is an album cover from the group 'Mika.' It is extremely vibrant and busy. There is a lot of colour going on with a doodle-theme cartoon of random objects. The colours create a cheerful reflection of the music which suits the pop genre. It includes minimal information, only giving credit to the group and specifying the name of the album. The main focus of the picture is the words in bold, 'MIKA,' with all sorts of colours and cartoons tied into it to draw the eye. This is effective because it would certainly stand out on a shop shelf. Again, it is consistent with the music videos 

The background clashes with what the singer is wearing, creating an attention-grabbing illusion. The singer is also dancing in big excited movements as if to the beat of the music to highlight the bouncy, fast pace of the music that makes it so inclusive in the pop genre.

This would be interesting to attempt. The album cover will take a lot of creativity and either graphic design skills or handy work. 

Indie album covers all have a uniqueness that are fairly common the indie music industry. They all have a grunge theme, light colour schemes with one element or object the eye-catcher. A lot of them have a weird iconic theme, like a landscape or image with something wrong with it. 

These are some examples. 

These are fairly easy to do provided a basic design with a quirky twist can be done and still look professional. The theme in these is that there is a cartoon with a disturbed element. This leaves the audience open minded about what they are going to hear; there is not much suggesting what kind of music tune there may be so the audience cannot prepare for it in the same way that they can an adele album. This can create a suspense and interest as well as surprise in the music and video. The videos can be randomised and quirky which can be fun to do.