Duffy's Pointers vs. some cover's we have discussed
I found Patrick Duffy's advice for designing an album cover very realistic. After reading through his guidelines I came to realize that he is almost telling people how NOT to screw up. It reminded me of improvising on a musical instrument. You want to play a scale that fits the chord progression, but that does not mean other notes would not work. So once I thought of this I tried to find some examples of album covers that we looked at in class on Wednesday to see if they followed his guidelines.
Instantly the first album cover that came to mind was Led Zeppelin's Physical Graffiti album. It is probably one of my favorite albums but in my opinion the cover is weak. It was placed on the rollingstones top 25 and this did not abide by a number of Duffy's suggestions. First of all, on the shelves in a store it would not stand out. It is almost completely gray which is a boring color. Also he mentions to make the name of the band easy to find. On this cover it is LED ZEPPELIN is small and faded into the building at the top. Although their cover may not be "standard?", due to their ridiculous fan base standing out is not an issue.
Another interesting Album cover that I found was Britney Spears' blackout. Once I got over the fact that Britney Spears has a new album titled "blackout", it follows Duffy's guidelines very well. Her name is very visible and the background design is very catchy. I think this cover would stand out very well next to hundreds of other cd's. I also think that the concept of the cover fits well with the content of the album. Her music is usually mostly electronic/poppy.
An important part of this article is that it seems to be targeted towards poor hopeful bands. He speaks directly about indie bands criticizing their tendency to put off the cover design until they are too low on money to make a decent cover. Interestingly almost all of the top album covers we discussed were from well known bands where money is most likely not an issue. Does money make that much of a difference, or do we not even consider lesser bands covers?
My point is simply that Duffy provides a safety net of rules and suggestions. A unexperienced band can use these guidelines strictly and not go wrong, but some of the best covers ever do not follow these guidelines at all.
I agree that Duffy's advice for designing an album is realistic and practical for an artist on a budget, but mainstream artists do not seem to need to follow his advice. I believe the reason mainstream artists can do whatever they want and still sell albums is that the consumer ususally has an idea of what albums they want to buy before they enter the album store. Either they had already heard the song on the radio, borrowed a friend's cd, or downloaded the mp3. Anyways what I am getting at is that the album cover usually doesn't matter much for mainstream artists and it doesn't matter much to to me. I usually buy my music from itunes and can't even remember the last time I bought a real physical cd. But for unknown bands, the album cover is very important and they should definetely follow Duffy's advice.
Submitted by matt33172 on Fri, 02/08/2008 - 09:39.I agree with you with many of the points, having also blogged on Duffy. There is something very unprofessional about Spear's new cd, but I can't put my finger on it. So I won't attempt an argument about it. I feel that when you are in the pop industry you don't have to put as much emphasis on the design, because the music seems to sell itself. This observation may have been made blindly, but its one nonetheless.
Submitted by Girl on Sat, 02/09/2008 - 15:54.