This document discusses CD cover designs for various artists and what design elements were effective at representing the music's genre and mood, as well as attracting the target audience. The author analyzes covers for Example, Cornershop, Jason Mraz, and Nizlopi. Elements like use of artist logos, vibrant colors, images from music videos are discussed. The author concludes they will incorporate these techniques like use of their music video images in their own CD cover design to promote recognition and appeal to their audience.

1. CD Cover Research
By Jonjo Sharp

2. Example – Playing In The Shadows
The CD cover for ‘Example – Playing In
The Shadows’ references the title of the
album, in which it shows a light side of
himself and the rest in shadows. This
contrast of light may reference his genre
of music, being Grime and Hip-Hop; both
being represented as dark bad genres.
This CD cover shows the artist which
may attract his target audience that he is
popular amongst. The expression on his
face, in compilation to the colour shows
that the album’s music will be ‘angry’
and contain a lot of base.
I will use some of these aspects in my
album, in which I will use the artist’s
logo to attract existing fans and will use
a compilation of colour to show the
mood of the album.

3. The back of the album
is much like the front,
as it shows the artist
and uses a contrast of
colour to present the
music’s genre. It
displays the barcode
and legal information at
the bottom of the CD, I
will also be presenting
this for my CD cover.

4. Cornershop – Brimful of Asha
On Cornershop’s digipak,
Brimful of Asha, they use
vibrant colours and they
use the same image of
the women on the deck-
stand throughout each
cover. They uses this
effect on the image to
promote their single as a
funky feel-good song and
they show the deck-
stand to display their
genre as pop or garage.
In my digipak I will use
vibrant colours to attract
my audience and to
present the genre of the
song.

5. Jason Mraz – We Sing. We Dance. We
Steal Things.
This album has crudely written
writing, which makes it appeal to a
young audience as they can relate
to being messy and not neat. It
also has a very rough picture of the
artist on display. This is easily
depicted as Jason Mraz because of
the hat he is wearing, which is a
reference to his chart-topping song
‘I’m Yours’ which was very
successful and made Mraz famous
among an easy listening audience
as when as delving into other
genres of music. In my production I
will use images of my music video
to promote my digipak because the
audience will easily recognise the
song and artists.

6. Nizlopi – JCB Song
For my CD cover I was
inspired by Nizlopi’s
cover art for the ‘JCB
Song’. This is because
the music video of this
song was stop-start
animation, which
relates to my product
and covers the same
sort of genre for
music.

7. This CD Cover has the artist’s name in a cartoon
style font, with the picture of his animation. This
helped promote the CD because the same
animation was used in their music video that got
to the number 1 spot, and was a huge success.
This meant that when the CD is seen people
automatically knew what song it was from.