This document analyzes the album art styles of the bands Smash Mouth, Bowling for Soup, and Sugar Ray. It finds that they share several conventions, including using bold, vibrant colors; cartoon or animated effects; simple designs; amateur-looking fonts; and visual associations with their album titles. These conventions give the bands identifiable styles that appeal to a sense of fun and help their album covers stand out on store shelves. The document suggests these styles were popular in the 1990s when the bands originated and have since become part of their brands.

1. Digipak research
Smash mouth album art & similar
artists.

2. When grouped together it becomes clear that Smash Mouth have integrated a
certain style into their artwork across all their albums over the past couple of
decades. They feel old, as though they were made in the 60’s or 80’s with quite a
retro feel about them. In addition they all have quite an amateur finish to them, but
it’s possible that this is intended as it may link to the band themselves being quite
funny and comical, and maybe not typical ‘pop stars’ but more middle aged men that
are in a moderately successful band.

3. Not all the covers feature the band themselves, but the few that do once again capture a more
laid back, fun image of the band with them pulling faces at the camera or even in cartoon form.
Another convention which seems to run throughout their album work is bright colours. This use
of bold, vibrant colours such as blues, reds, oranges and greens gives the band certain
connotations as it suggests confidence and fun, since the colours are bright and uplifting. This is
then translated into their music through lyrics and tempo, as well as the personas of the band
members themselves. While the colours reflect a culture of cartoon and pop art, the
compositions of the album covers are usually quite simple, perhaps to allow for the strong colour
palette.
As well as giving the band a style and an identity, their designs are clever in
that they allow the digipaks stand out against others in retail environments
due to the bright colours and simple eye catching compositions.
Another aspect which we picked up on as a group when analysing the existing bands artwork is
that the font’s used as Album Titles are, in our opinion, very average and ‘gimmicky’, as though
they’ve just fonts taken from word art and placed over the image.

4. Finally, many of their album covers show a direct, explicit link to the album title. For example, in
‘Astro Lounge’ the cover is an image of a tall skyscraper rising up from a planet into space. Often
these buildings have lounges and members areas on the top floors as they have the best views,
suggesting the cover is showing a ‘lounge’ in space, which relates to the morpheme ‘astro’.
Smash mouth conventions
• 1. Bold, vibrant colours
• 2. Cartoon or animated effect
• 3. Light hearted/funny
• 4. Simple in design
• 5. Amateur font
• 6. Association with Title

5. Bowling for soup
Bowling For Soup or BFS are an American rock band originally from Texas, and
in terms of genre can be described as rock, pop, pop-punk and comedy rock.
This idea of ‘comedy rock’ is interesting as it’s definition is the use of parody
or satire comedy, therefore making it a perfect term to describe the style
that Smash Mouth and similar artists are channelling through the certain
conventions I’ve been discussing.
BFS started out in 1994, the same year that Smash Mouth were originally
formed. This suggests that their style is something which was perhaps
popular at the time (explaining the old fashioned artwork and basic but
comical music videos), and they’ve just carried it through into their more
recent work as it’s become what they’re known for and wouldn’t be able to
compete with current artists if they were to try something different.

6. The font convention found in Smash Mouth’s albums appears to be more of a
general convention linked to this type of band as Bowling for Soup’s albums also
feature similar font types and placement.
Here we can see the use of
cartoon filters and effects,
another style that Smash
Mouth uses. It also creates a
relationship between the
album title ad the
illustration, as the movies
have an association with
animation and cartoons.
Like Smash Mouth, Bowling for soup feature themselves in many of their covers
being silly and informal, such as here where the use of armbands on a grown man
is used in conjunction with the mid-dive comical facial expressions to create a
comical scene that mocks itself. Again the colours are vibrant, contrasting and
cheerful.

7. Sugar Ray
Sugar ray were formed a little earlier in 1986, and again have links to the rock and pop
punk genres. Their first album cover was for the album floored released in 1998 and is
shown below. The style of it again is similar to Smash Mouth’s with bright colours and
quite a cartoon-y finish, this time relating to the idea of video games. It’s more
complicated than others I’ve analysed but they seem to simplify over time.

8. Again in Sugar ray’s albums we can see this use
of font that looks old fashioned, although they
seem to keep it more consistent than Smash
Mouth across their album/track covers.
The simplicity of the composition in this cover gives it
quite an amateur, old fashioned feel as it suggests that
whoever designed and produced it didn’t have access to
modern technology that can create high quality,
polished images with a range of fonts and editing tools.
Having said this the album above (14.59) containing the
single every morning was released in 1999, explaining
why it may feel a bit behind the times. However, their
most recent album released in 2009 has a very similar
style, and this continuity suggests their covers to be
designed this way on purpose as it’s become their
branding and their image.