What we know about album artwork

Album artwork is an amorphous square. The Beatles White album is the bare minimum, Sgt. Peppers requires photography studios, sets, a cast and planning. Coming up with designs for release artwork runs just such a gamut.

Where are we now?

People complained about how tiny CD’s were when they came out and how you couldn’t pour over the art work or roll a big joint on them like you could on a vinyl album. Now artwork has been relegated to being a wee square on instagram/itunes/spotify.

You would think in our internet driven world that visuals no longer mattered. They were probably on the wane to be honest until social media kicked in and everything became visual again. From the mindless facebook and twitter scrolling that rewards shiney things to the quest for the perfect square on Instagram, a visual component to your release cycle is still a huge part of the music.

So what is album artwork?

Just like music videos. How long is a piece of string? They can act as an amuse bouche for the music. Pastel tones suggesting something introspective or a steam punk devil cartoon suggesting some sort of 80’s metal, or they can use classic graphics and typesetting to spirit you back to a specific time.

Kenneth has a background in graphics and branding and Neil just extends what he does in music videos. Between them they’ve put together various single release artworks over the years. Sometimes these start with a photo session(Anton Christmas Singles, Fenella, Jailhouse blues), Sometimes there’s a vintage photo(Emme Woods), Sometimes there’s a digital Illustration(Wolverine) and sometimes there’s an analogue illustration - I’d like to point out that while we did the drawing of Anton and Charlie, we didn’t do the one of the house. The credit for that goes to Bella.

How do we do Album Artwork?

In all cases below, we’ve already been working with the artist, so it tends to just morph into “We need release artwork. What can we do?” We can usually come up with something based nonmaterial we have, but there’s a process we have to building some artwork if you have no ideas. Drop us a line.