Research and Planning:- Iconography and branding of my chosen artist.

Another useful thing that I have looked at in preparation for creating my album cover is looking at iconography and branding. Iconography is studying the description and layout of images and interpretation what the effect or meaning is of these images. This is very important for making an album cover because if there is an image on the album that is completely unrelated to the theme then the audience will be confused and will most likely not but the product.

Branding is also important because you have to make sure that you are selling the artist to the audience. Branding is the "name, term, design, symbol or any other feature that identifies one seller's good and distinguishes them from other sellers."

To help visualise the branding of my chosen band I made a collage of their existing image. Ravenface's existing branding consists of mostly dark colours with a feather motif and their name in bold, Gothic font.

For our branding that we are going to have on our album cover we have decided to not use a feather motif as we do not want to copy the bands existing logo. Instead we are using a Gothic font of the band's name and from developing iconography from our music video we have decided to have a repeated image of twisted, dark tree branches with a watch that was shown in the video. This is because our theme that we wanted to depict was the 'annihilation' of the world and running against time.