11. 10 ideas to design music album cover
Album cover is an essential part of a disc. While some may consider it an additional piece of information, a simple note on a disc content, album cover plays a significant role in disc perception, in interpretation of disc content as well as an artist. Considering marketing and commercial aspect of disc promotion, good labels and albums cover work for attracting potential buyers and converting them into fans of an artist.
An album cover also:
- Informs a listener on the content and music essentials as dates, places, events.
- Sets expectations about the content.
- Encourages a listener to go deeper and to listen to other discs of the artist.
Album cover is a strategic element of planning relationships with the audience in the long run perspective. Thus it must be high quality, professionally designed and catered to the interests of listeners. To cope with the task a proper album cover creator is needed.
What do you need to know before making your first album cover
Though album cover art is a movement free of strict rules, still there are certain recommendations of album cover design to consider. Album cover may contain all music album essentials – a name of an album, a list of tracks, a date of release, an event, etc. A piece of visual art – music cover art combines text and visuals to interpret the spirit of the music inside the box. It is the visuals which set expectations and mood for listening to the music.
The next guide presents you 10 best album covers which are made with RonyaSoft CD DVD Label Maker. All the names and artists are fictional, and any matches are purely coincidental.
To create album covers presented in this guide we use the CD Front Insert template.
To learn about album cover size see our article - CD cover dimensions. Also see how to create CD CD covers and inserts with RonyaSoft CD DVD Label Maker in our tutorials: how to make an album cover, how to create a CD case insert and how to make CD cover design
1. The Artist/Band Album Cover
It is one of the most evident still intriguing ways to create an album cover. Search for an original photo or take your own picture of you as an artist or a band. You can cut a cinema shot from a videoclip, concert video or any other video.
The best solution is a photo showing an artist or all participants of a band in a close up view. Upload a picture to the RonyaSoft CD DVD Label Maker and fit it in the template. Place the text over a picture. Make sure the text does not overlap the artists. In case it is impossible to place without overlapping the image, then try changing the opacity of the text block.
Album cover with portrait of the artist
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Album cover with band photo
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2. The Literal/Illusion Album Cover
Music cover art does not impose strict design rules upon you. In case the emotional charge of the album resonates with abstract or illusive images, you can use any corresponding picture. Please, mind, that a background with an active pattern makes text less readable. Thus you need to take extra care of text block design. Make sure, that text stands out on the background, it is well noticeable and a listener will easily indicate it.
This is an optimum solution when you do not have a proper image of an artist or a band. Moreover, you can create such an illusive or abstract picture on your own without copying it from the web.
Album cover with illusion
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Album cover with literal name
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3. The Colorful/Minimalist Album Cover
This album cover design idea resonates with the previous one and suggests you to create minimal artworks in RonyaSoft album cover creator. Looking at the first example, you will see that we used simple colored squares to draw figure 8 adding the text “reasons”. Such music cover art design will suit the cases when an album name or an artist name contains any digit.
The next “minimal” album cover art design is a schematic representation of a screenshot of music player playing the composition of an artist. In this case you will need just to create function keys and playback progress bar with Cliparts and to choose corresponding font for artist and album name. You can use colors as background. But keep it minimalistic as well.
Colorful album cover
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Minimalist album cover
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4. The Text or Quote Album Cover
Another simple, yet very effective and strong idea of album cover design is to put text on a colored background only. RonyaSoft CD DVD Label Designer offers flexible tools for text design. Apart from supporting of a large variety of text fonts and effects, the editor allows to move, rotate or twist the one of the special text creating a feel of 3-dimensional positioning.
You can also place a text as a symbolic element of a picture, as it is shown on the eclipse example.
Album cover with quote
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Text themed album cover
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5. The Abstract/Geometry Album Cover
RonyaSoft CD DVD Label Maker (you can download it right from this page) offers an extensive collection of cliparts to use for creating your own, original, distinctive album cover. Try geometric forms, abstract pictures or unexpected color matching in you album cover design. You will find all necessary tools in RonyaSoft album cover creator for that task. For example, the first picture shows you a piece of fiber in a close up view, while another example of an album cover present a geometric butterfly compiled from dozens of rectangles and triangles.
Abstract album cover
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Geometric album cover
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Mind that these ideas are our own vision of how to present a music album idea via album cover. There are some tips on the preparation process:
- Get necessary background information – list all essential data about the album you are going to create a cover for, about you as an artist, about an event which led to creation of the music album.
- Review previous album covers – list distinctive features of album designs (colors, fonts, symbols, etc).
- Find necessary background photos in high resolution.
The best album cover creator software provides:
- Professionally designed layouts and templates containing all necessary elements of an album cover.
- Simple and logic interface with no need to research all the options and ways of interaction before getting to creating an album cover.
- Simple to use tools and options.
- Great compatibility – with graphic formats in case you want to upload your own template as well as with printers to get your album cover done.
Try to be original and to create a different album cover artwork even though it seems that everything is already created and there are no original ideas left. RonyaSoft album cover creator will assist you in assembling different forms, pictures, fonts into a genuine album cover artwork.
Make your album cover speak of your emotions, mood, let it convey the idea of your art, music, album. It is up to you whether your ideas will be monochrome or colored. This is time to feel like a visual art designer and to bring words and sounds into lines and colors.
We hope this guide will help you to create a really fresh album cover or at least it will inspire you for igniting new ideas for album cover art designs.