Cd Covers

I was taking a look at the production of cd covers today since they vary so much in design to demonstrate the right emotion or look the musician wants to portray. So I visited non other than the GIANT commercial corporate website of target.

Here are some I found interesting and why...

I found that there are a couple of categories that cd covers sold at target fall under. This one is under the "interesting portrait" category. There is a lot of variation in the creativity of this portrait and this one I found to be on the more interesting side because of the framing hands and yellow lines. I really like how the dealt with the typeography in that the same family of type is used and the name of the album, (since it's not michael buble's first album) is bolded and therefor more important in my eyes.

This alicia keyls album I also found under the interesting portrait category. I find that most portrait pieces that I like have graphic or typographic elements helping the portrait. Here there are both. The color scheme and pattern going on in her scarf dress are reflected in the background, drawing your eyes to the right after looking at alicia keys. Then you see the more important part, the name of the album and the artist. I thought it worked together very well.

The other category I found in the CD cover consumer field is the illustrative cover. There is graphic and traditional illustration and a combo of the two. This one I liked because that heart is not really a heart, it's a bunch of squares that form one. On top of that you have these saturated red squares pulling your eye up and down while focusing on these little pictures that are in the squares, including a larger image of a girls face. I also like the hand scripted type, I think it goes well with the tone.

This cover also falls under the illustration category, but is more graphic in quality. This group also uses red elements to pull the eye around the artwork. I like this cover because the color scheme is simple and the images are interesting. Also the typography is the only thing that is brown, making it stand out against the rest of the image.

The other category I found was photographic covers. Some cd covers have white sandy beaches stacked with palm trees and some go for the more beat up look, like this one. Here is an extremely distressed photograph of a windmill. It makes me think 70s, family farm neighborhood, clean air. I didn't enjoy the music as much as the image but you know, it happens.

This one has the same old photograph quality that I liked.

The other category that I feel like is significantly smaller than the other categories, typography. There is image in the background but I like this cover more for the clean typographic design. I just couldn't find a lot of cd covers that had strong typographic qualities.