Album Cover

Project details

For this university project, I was tasked with creating an album cover for my favourite artist. We had to pick an art style to base the design around, but I couldn’t choose the style arbitrarily. I had to consider how the design movement concepts or philosophy appropriately relates and visually communicates the artist.

In a time lapse is a creation by Ludovico Einaudi, an Italian composer and pianist. Einaudi has created a 14-track album that incorporates other styles and genres into his work while remaining organized and true to classical music. Due to this research, I felt that International typographic style would be a good fit with not only the artist but the album itself. Once I had decided this, I wanted to find a prominent designer who was known for their international typographic style and who better than Josef Müller-Brockmann. Brockmann’s work was what I used as inspiration to help design the album cover. The Swiss designer is one of the most well-known international typographic style artists. He is known for his use of rigid grid structures to produce harmony within his artwork but tends to add an abstract twist to distinguish his work from others.

This album cover tries to represent his abstract yet organized style with the use of international typographic style. This art style is known for its cleanliness, readability and objectivity and this fits perfectly with the style that he is known for. The style is heavily reliant on structure as it creates a hierarchy that’s easy to follow and to read. Partnered with the Berthold Akzisenz Grotesk typeface, this sans serif type creates an album cover that is easy and pleasing to read.

For this album, I tried to create something similar following a rigid grid structure. The album consists of three colours which follows the idea of international typographic style using limited colours. The piano and the extended keys featured on the cover create squares and rectangles that all have an equal ratio to one another. The longest black key splits the cover in half and the other long black key splits the left side in half again keeping an equal ratio. Each black key is half the width of each white key, and the keyboard lays in between the same distance between the bottom and the middle of the cover.