Analysis of the conventions of Bastille's album and single covers

1. BASTILLE COVERS

2. ALBUM COVERS

3. CONVENTIONS OF ALBUM COVERS
All Album covers from Bastille follow a clear pattern:
• “BAD STEEL presents” is at the very top in small font. “Bad Steel” is a fictional company, created just to add credibility to the aim of making this cover for an album look instead like a
film poster. It is called this because of phonetic similarities with “Bastille” and it sounds like a plausible film company
• “Bastille” in much bigger font just underneath in the font that is recognisable as part of the brand now due to it’s exposure on almost all Bastille product
• The main subject of an image that fills the whole slide is found in/ around the centre (the image is one of the few variables in this formula)
• (the album title is another) Without encroaching on any key part of the picture, it sits within quotations marks in the same font as “Bastille” but slightly smaller
• Under this are a list of credits which is unconventional for the front cover of an album. This adds to the illusion of this being a film poster because it follows many of their conventions.

4. SINGLE COVERS

5. CONVENTIONS OF SINGLES
All of the covers made for each single bastille has released follow a remarkably uniform theme. The most obvious one is that each one has the band’s name “Bastille” which reaches
from the left to right side. The font is identical and more notably the A is stylised as Δ making an individual feature. The font is all capitalised, sans serif and fairly standard however
there looks to be a slight inconsistency in the brush fill making it not as sharp. The only other text on the cover is the song title. Out of the 10 singles (9 unique singles) I found all share
at least one letter with “Bastille”. The names run vertically and intersect the horizontally running band name at the point where there is a common letter so it only needs to be printed
once as it is shared. For example for the song “Flaws” the A is shared and for “Pompeii” the second I is. The height of where “Bastille” is positioned along the y-axis is dependent on the
order of where the common letter comes in the single title (e.g. bottom for Pompeii as the last letter of Pompeii is used). The same can be said for the position of the song name on the
x-axis (e.g. “Overjoyed descends at the far right because the mutual letter is the last in “bastille”, an E). Overjoyed also has other interesting obstacles that make it an exception in that
it’s the only one where the text colour changes to accommodate for the background otherwise it could have proved difficult to read. Furthermore, because of the length of the word, size
of text and general limitations of positioning to the composition of the shot, the word has turned 90° left and started reading horizontally- it had to turn left (rather than right) realistically
because our culture reads left to right so otherwise it would be difficult to comprehend.

6. CONVENTIONS OF SINGLES
For the even longer titles comprising of more than one word, the word which has the shared letter (which happens to be the last in 2/3 the available cases) is treated normally going
downwards however the rest of the words sit on top going horizontally. Inevitably their size is decreased so the text doesn’t dominate the cover. The lesser words like “we”, “in” and “the”
in “Things we Lost in the Fire” are shrunk further because they are less significant and allows more space for the key words. For “Laura Palmer” which is the only single title with extra
A’s that aren’t already being shared a second bond is made joining” Palmer” to “Laura” which is already joined to “Bastille” both via an A and both are stylised as Δ. Despite having the
chance no bonds were made over the letter T, I believe this was because it is the most centre letter in the configuration due to wider letters on the left side. It would mean if a title was
placed there it would cut straight down the middle and cause an equal split which creates a static, dull shot. It is uncommon to use halves within photography but more thirds as it allows
the eye to be led in a specific direction and captivate the audience. Bastille have effectively and intentionally directed our eye to certain subjects of the images. The pictures used are all
taken directly from their respective videos. The most common subject in these stills are generally people. Although none clearly show the person’s face whether it’s because they are
masked, blocked or facing the opposite direction. Other than characters there is an emphasis on the landscape with use of rule of thirds. These separations are created by the fore, mid
and background. The other examples are references to props/ settings from the video. There seems to be a slightly grainy quality to all of the photographs and any lights look dimmed
creating a soft effect.