Graphic Design Album Covers.

So i had already looked at idyllic setting covers and after research had finalised a prototype for myself. Now time to attempt the opposite, the graphic album cover.
Although there are many types of this edition of album cover,the graphic cover we are more focused on is one which has a design, created by a blend of pictures, or cartoon images, often very colourful.
Examples of this are found in Mika's 'life in cartoon motion' and Keane's 'Under The Iron Sea':

In order to create a professional looking graphic album cover, we had to find out how to work on illustrator or adobe photoshop CS5. Although illustrator was more applicable for graphic design in this case, we decided that as adobe photoshop was much more easily accessible on our school computers, as well as having the most experience on it, we would use that.
It was obvious that our album cover should in some way relate to the name of the album, which we recently decided would be 'Everyday Superheroes'. We thought first about having a picture of the band all wearing normal clothes, with their instruments, but all with red superhero capes on. However, we thought in order for this picture to look professional we would have to have a beautiful day, in which the sun was shining, however, in England in January, these perfect days are hard to come buy. Additionally, this idea didn't feel very much like a graphic album cover. Our next idea was generated from a little Sunday reading, when i was catching up on some comic books. I analysed the cover of Amazing Spiderman #568 as the cover of this particular comic in my collection really appealed to me and most definitely grabbed my attention. It then sprang to my mind that it would be really cool if i could draw a picture of the band, cartoonise the characters, which would be appealing, clever but also stick to our brief of a graphic album cover, however after many attempts to draw this it continued to look unprofessional.

I still thought that the idea of the comic was good so i began to analyse the classic comic conventions. An believed that key connotations of a comic book cover were; a barcode, the name of the comic book, the name of the label and the issue number.
We began to construct an idea which had a comic book strip in a background, giving the album cover the basic convention of a comic which is very easily recognisable. Following that we decided to have the band name in the center of the page as the comic book title, with the album title beneath it, and the issue number in the top left corner, as usual. Finally we superimposed a star sticker with 'featuring the hit singles...' which are often found on albums. Our finish product we were extremely proud of and after much editing we stood back and admired our work.