Audio Science

Have you ever tried designing an album cover? It can be surprisingly easy if you think creatively and study some common design principles. If you’re the creator of the music for the album you’re thinking of making cover art for, the advantages of doing the design yourself are many. Since you are the one with the original vision for the music, you may represent that feeling yourself in your cover art, thus strengthening the image and impact of the album.
This tutorial is geared around helping you think creatively and turn your ideas into a design.

I’ll be using Adobe Photoshop 7.0 (yes I’m cheap, I haven’t gone to CS yet).

First you’ll need the right dimensions, and for that I highly recommend checking out this page. It has all of the dimensions you’ll need for just about any type of CD insert design.
For your convenience, here are the dimensions for the front cover (image is from the page mentioned above):

To start with, you’ll need to create a new file with dimensions of 4.75″ x 4.715″, at 300 dpi resolution (if not higher).
The next important thing is choosing a base color. Think about the mood of the album and how you’d like to convey it. Then think of what color would represent that the best.

For this example, we’ve got a warm jazz album, pretty low-key, by a piano/upright bass/drums trio. The name of the album is “Flying Low”. So just let that roll around in your head a little - what would you do to accentuate the earthy, organic, sensitive feel of this album? Remember, this is all about helping you think creatively and turn those ideas into real designs.

So I thought I’d start with a sunset photo, and found this one taken from a plane. ( photo from scx.hu - Sunset Over Clouds (Plane) 2 by rotw) Perfect for the album title. The image was so good that I didn’t have to enhance it with levels adjustment at all.

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The next most important thing is the font used, and what kind of style you set the type with. Here I’ve used a sophisticated sans-serif font in all caps, with the group name and album name right next to each other. This is a very popular, typical way to do the titles for albums, so I thought it would be just right for this tutorial.

I created a black bar behind the text, applied some glow (with Color Dodge blend setting) to it. I wanted the black bar to be very subtle, but to have the glow still show well around the outsides (decreasing the layer opacity gives the glow a dullness, while decreasing the glow effect opacity keeps the saturated, realistic glow of the Color Dodge intact). So I decreased the fill amount of the layer to make the black bar itself transparent, and took the glow effect opacity down to keep the glow from being blown-out.

(click to enlarge)

Now that is already quite usable, but I decided to play around with some solid-color designs, and came up with a slightly funky airplane propeller-looking design. As with the title bar, I applied some glow (Color Dodge mode) to the layer, reduced the fill to decrease the opacity of the design but still let the glow shine through, and then reduced the overall opacity of the layer as well. For placement, I discovered that it worked best next the the title, set on the title bar, as that drew the eye toward the title and made the entire image feel more comfortable.

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I felt like it needed some kind of spacer in between the group name and the title, so I used the normal “geeky” ::::: spacer, but without any glow to provide contrast.

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So there is an example of a downtempo sort of cover for this jazz group, and it seems to create a good pre-impression & expectation about the music, which helps a lot with what the first impressions will be like. Think about just what kind of expectation you want to create for the music, and how to approach creating a maximum impact for that. The better you set people up to hear your music, the better their impression will be of it.

This is just one of many, many standard album design formats. I want to arm you with as many of these formats as you need to get started, so tomorrow I’ll be demonstrating some more examples.