It’s obvious that you all have seen Pink Floy’s “The Dark Side of The Moon”, Nirvana’s “Nevermind” and The Strokes’ “Is This It” album cover art. The question is how they designed these great pieces of design? By the time you finish this article you are able to go out and create your masterpiece and even get paid.
Before going through all the stuff, you should know, we are going to show you what areas we need to cover:
The Idea
Get Inspiration
Background
Fonts
Naming
Elements
Let’s know more about cover arts and know How to Design an Album Cover.
The Idea
One of most famous Pink Floyd’s album covers
Everything starts with an idea, so goes for designing an album cover. We are not going to teach you how to get ideas about your designs, but we are here to elaborate on the importance of an idea in designing and particularly designing a cover art. Remember that, there is no rule for ideas. You can picture a very complicated pattern or very simple, minimal and somehow obvious ideas. It really doesn’t matter. For example, look at “The Dark Side of The Moon” cover. It’s so simple and on the other hand so great. Therefore, your design shouldn’t be strictly ruled by your framework. Go for yourself and test everything.
Design an album cover art with your ideas is so fun, but finding that idea sometimes gets so hard. It’s important to get ideas from whatever you see in your day. Sometimes a lamp or a shadow can give you an idea that leads you to creating a masterpiece album cover art.
It’s also worth to mention that the idea should be matched to the music that you are designing an album cover for, so you must be familiar with the genres of music as well as the artistic features of graphic design. Knowing more about the art, colors and techniques, helps you to be more creative. It also makes more idea, because more you know, more windows of knowledge open up and your vision will improve.
Get Inspired
First of all, you should know that inspiration is far different than copying. You can see an album cover art and get inspired. You can also see one and decide to copy it! Personally, I believe that if an artist tries to copy another’s work, the two designs will be different. Getting inspiration is as important as having an idea. So, when you want to design an album cover art, you should be planed for getting inspiration. It’s no something that you should do in sequences, you can get inspired when you are walking you dog out, when you are reading a newspaper or even when you accidently mess up in photoshop.
How to Get Inspired?
See designers’ works. See what color they use, what software they use and know the colors. You also should know your way. First, determine what is your style and mark your merits. It will help you to find right places for getting inspired. Design an album cover for yourself to get more inspiration. You can ask your friends to give you some feedback, then you can see what you haven’t been able to see before. One of the easiest ways is looking at cover arts in Coverartland.
Use Online Platforms
Social media like Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest are useful tools for you to get most of your inspirations. There are tons of designers, painters and graphists working on these platforms and each one of them are a killer inspiration. I should say again, just try to get inspired and not copying other’s works. It’s not ethical and if you try to make it even better, it has no character in it.
Spotify Is Your Treasure Planet
Hundreds of track and albums goes live on Spotify every day. You can look at the covers and get millions of inspirations. By just looking at them you can have ideas about how to design an album cover art. You can also find answer of these questions:
What kind of album cover arts musicians like?
Who are the famous designers?
What are the styles?
Which one is better?
So, you get the idea and now you found your inspirational sources, what’s next? Start and design your album cover art.
Background
Black background
The background of your album cover art is so important. It will change your art work completely. Choose is so wisely. It should have so much harmony with your other elements.
The background of you design shouldn’t necessarily being a solid color. You can also use patterns, landscape or even a simple blurry image. The choice is completely on yours.
Every type of album cover art has its own characteristics. For example, if are designing an album cover for a death rock music, you can’t use light and live colors like green!
Background usually has a great impact on the viewer, therefor motivates potential buyers to buy your art work.
Colors
Colors are one of the most fundamentals of your design. You should choose them as wisely as possible to get the best possible outcome. But there is a question that how to find the most suitable color scheme for your album cover art?
Harmony in Cover art
Know the harmonies and get familiar with the dynamics that colors have, etc.
You can use free and online tools like pallets. These websites provide you tens of color patterns that you can use.
For choosing color, you should consider other factors like your goal in designing the art piece, the audience of it and most importantly the message that your design may transfer. Look at this art work. By looking at it, this idea comes into your mind: FEAR!
Fonts and Other Components
It’s so vital that you use free license fonts for copyright purposes. Before using any fonts, be sure that you have the right to use them commercially. Some fonts are free for personal use, but there are some fonts that you can’t use for commercial purposes.
This goes for other components. For example, if you use a sun vector/image on your album cover art, it should be free license. Otherwise, the owner of the image/vector can sue you for using unauthorized usage of his/her image.
Unsplash by Goolge is a great place for you to have tens of images to use. Design album cover art with free components and that’s the only rule here. Freepik is another example for getting components you need for your album cover art.
If you are looking for a broader place to find littraly whatever you want, you can buy Shutterstock membership. It allows you to find and download any kind of vectors and images that you like.
Cover art is a piece of image of illustration that many people use it on their art works, specially their music. Technically, a cover art is different from an album cover, which will discuss later on. What we are trying to do here is have cover art vs album cover type of cmparison. Cover Art …
Mankind and inspiration are two friends that never get separated. From the beginning of time, humans have been searching for inspiration. This concept gets more serious when we talk about inspirational album cover arts. For you as an artist, in any field, there was a moment that you felt empty, exhausted and hopeless. Indeed, it …
Probably you know Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Drake, and Tupac, they are all hip-hop legends who has great hits throughout their journey. But there is another factor that made their hits more recognizable, their album cover. Let’s have a tour and know the best rap and hip-hop album covers. And at the end, we will tell …
Surrealism can be considered as a new style of art. It’s been a while that we can see the footprints of surrealism in album cover art industry. Stay with us and let’s go through best surreal album cover arts of all time. At the end we also going to teach you how to buy surreal …
How to Design an Album Cover Art? The Ultimate Guide
It’s obvious that you all have seen Pink Floy’s “The Dark Side of The Moon”, Nirvana’s “Nevermind” and The Strokes’ “Is This It” album cover art. The question is how they designed these great pieces of design? By the time you finish this article you are able to go out and create your masterpiece and even get paid.
Before going through all the stuff, you should know, we are going to show you what areas we need to cover:
Let’s know more about cover arts and know How to Design an Album Cover.
The Idea
Everything starts with an idea, so goes for designing an album cover. We are not going to teach you how to get ideas about your designs, but we are here to elaborate on the importance of an idea in designing and particularly designing a cover art. Remember that, there is no rule for ideas. You can picture a very complicated pattern or very simple, minimal and somehow obvious ideas. It really doesn’t matter. For example, look at “The Dark Side of The Moon” cover. It’s so simple and on the other hand so great. Therefore, your design shouldn’t be strictly ruled by your framework. Go for yourself and test everything.
Design an album cover art with your ideas is so fun, but finding that idea sometimes gets so hard. It’s important to get ideas from whatever you see in your day. Sometimes a lamp or a shadow can give you an idea that leads you to creating a masterpiece album cover art.
It’s also worth to mention that the idea should be matched to the music that you are designing an album cover for, so you must be familiar with the genres of music as well as the artistic features of graphic design. Knowing more about the art, colors and techniques, helps you to be more creative. It also makes more idea, because more you know, more windows of knowledge open up and your vision will improve.
Get Inspired
First of all, you should know that inspiration is far different than copying. You can see an album cover art and get inspired. You can also see one and decide to copy it! Personally, I believe that if an artist tries to copy another’s work, the two designs will be different. Getting inspiration is as important as having an idea. So, when you want to design an album cover art, you should be planed for getting inspiration. It’s no something that you should do in sequences, you can get inspired when you are walking you dog out, when you are reading a newspaper or even when you accidently mess up in photoshop.
How to Get Inspired?
See designers’ works. See what color they use, what software they use and know the colors. You also should know your way. First, determine what is your style and mark your merits. It will help you to find right places for getting inspired. Design an album cover for yourself to get more inspiration. You can ask your friends to give you some feedback, then you can see what you haven’t been able to see before. One of the easiest ways is looking at cover arts in Coverartland.
Use Online Platforms
Social media like Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest are useful tools for you to get most of your inspirations. There are tons of designers, painters and graphists working on these platforms and each one of them are a killer inspiration. I should say again, just try to get inspired and not copying other’s works. It’s not ethical and if you try to make it even better, it has no character in it.
Spotify Is Your Treasure Planet
Hundreds of track and albums goes live on Spotify every day. You can look at the covers and get millions of inspirations. By just looking at them you can have ideas about how to design an album cover art. You can also find answer of these questions:
So, you get the idea and now you found your inspirational sources, what’s next? Start and design your album cover art.
Background
The background of your album cover art is so important. It will change your art work completely. Choose is so wisely. It should have so much harmony with your other elements.
The background of you design shouldn’t necessarily being a solid color. You can also use patterns, landscape or even a simple blurry image. The choice is completely on yours.
Every type of album cover art has its own characteristics. For example, if are designing an album cover for a death rock music, you can’t use light and live colors like green!
Background usually has a great impact on the viewer, therefor motivates potential buyers to buy your art work.
Colors
Colors are one of the most fundamentals of your design. You should choose them as wisely as possible to get the best possible outcome. But there is a question that how to find the most suitable color scheme for your album cover art?
Harmony in Cover art
Know the harmonies and get familiar with the dynamics that colors have, etc.
You can use free and online tools like pallets. These websites provide you tens of color patterns that you can use.
For choosing color, you should consider other factors like your goal in designing the art piece, the audience of it and most importantly the message that your design may transfer. Look at this art work. By looking at it, this idea comes into your mind: FEAR!
Fonts and Other Components
It’s so vital that you use free license fonts for copyright purposes. Before using any fonts, be sure that you have the right to use them commercially. Some fonts are free for personal use, but there are some fonts that you can’t use for commercial purposes.
This goes for other components. For example, if you use a sun vector/image on your album cover art, it should be free license. Otherwise, the owner of the image/vector can sue you for using unauthorized usage of his/her image.
Unsplash by Goolge is a great place for you to have tens of images to use. Design album cover art with free components and that’s the only rule here. Freepik is another example for getting components you need for your album cover art.
If you are looking for a broader place to find littraly whatever you want, you can buy Shutterstock membership. It allows you to find and download any kind of vectors and images that you like.
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Surrealism can be considered as a new style of art. It’s been a while that we can see the footprints of surrealism in album cover art industry. Stay with us and let’s go through best surreal album cover arts of all time. At the end we also going to teach you how to buy surreal …