BRIEF ONE
RESEARCH & CASE STUDIES
Business planNING
After scouring through some business plan samples shared in the webinar and learning more of the ins and outs of managing clients, I knew my plan had to be realistic to me. My dream job would be doing graphic design for the music industry, so let’s start there.
CASE STUDY
My inspiration is mainly from what I observed with designer Robert Beatty whose signature style became incredibly popular with the release of Tame Impala’s album Currents. Artists and record labels wanted to align themselves and their projects with his distinctive style, but as his designs take a huge amount of time there is a high wait time and high cost involved. Instead of working with him directly, sadly, some artists were replicating his style in a much lower quality knock-off, which also devalues his work. I thought about how you could make space in your practice to take on those big custom, high-profile jobs, but still fill a demand on a much smaller scale, perhaps using a sub-brand.
importance of album art - judging a book by its cover
Since the very first days of recorded music, visual art has gradually become more and more important as a secondary element of the art. In a record shop, the first thing you will see of a newly released record is the front cover of the sleeve and so while the market for recorded music exploded over the 1960s, so too did the appeal for album artwork that would grab one’s attention. - https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/10-iconic-album-covers-designed-by-master-artists/
Not only, is the album cover a reflection of the music inside, but it’s a vehicle to display the artwork created by the artist or designer to a global audience. The cover art is almost always to entry point and introduction to the music.
Long before the digital era and the design disciplines that emerged with it, there was a unique canvas, reaching a visual audience of millions; every designer dreamed of working on a vinyl record album cover.
Invented in 1938 by graphic designer Alex Steinweiss while working at Columbia Records as an art director, album cover art quickly became one of the most important design disciplines in the world. Thanks to Steinweiss’s inventive concept and unique visual language, a new way of representing music was born.
In the following years, cover design became a vital part of music albums, not to mention a strong cultural influence. It was one of the few mediums at the time which reached millions of people and had a truly global impact thus providing designers with a canvas through which they could express their creativity and originality to the whole world. It was also considered to be among the most effective marketing tools. Oftentimes the album cover was the main thing that persuaded people to purchase an album, rather than the music itself. In many cases, the cover design was in fact much better than the music it represented.
The importance of cover design was so immense that it became a way for artists to popularize themselves and their work. Many renowned artists, such as Andy Warhol, Burt Goldblatt and Roger Dean either gained fame or kick-started their careers by designing album covers. - https://www.awwwards.com/the-forgotten-beauty-of-vinyl-album-cover-art.html
There is an abundance of iconic album art to pull from, so let’s look at some of my faves.
KIM GORDON INTERVIEWS RAYMOND PETTIBON
Business Models
There’s a lot to dig into around ethics and values of different business models, this op-ed looks at what a cooperative model truly means, and takes a closer look at rejecting the top-down structure and starting the business as worker-owned from the get go: https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/every-design-studio-should-be-a-worker-owned-studio/
While I didn’t see any other businesses offering the same concept as I am developing to produce album art, there was an interesting website offering original bookcover artwork for self-publishing writers specifically for e-books. GoOnWrite.com pumps out designs for different book genres and will then customize the title text when purchased. This means you get original artwork, customized to your book, for cheap. However, the designs are lacking, rushed, and AI-heavy:
