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.

Research and Planning- Conventions of my chosen genre in the album cover.

As we are creating an album cover for our music video I have looked at the codes and conventions that are shown on other artists albums within the metal genre. The most common conventions are:-

• Gothic/ Old text.
• Dark iconography such as skulls, pentagrams and blood.
• Colours suck as black, dark green, red, dark purple.
• Most has a very stylised design that is drawn.
• In some modern cases an image of the band.

To help me get a visual on the conventions in metal album covers I made a collage of other metal band's album covers. This is helpful for making my own album cover as I can see the overall layout of the covers and see how the bands have branded themselves through the covers, which are important factors that should be included on my album cover.

 

 After looking at these covers I have decided that I would like to have a drawn elemnet in the cover and am going to stay with using darker colours such as black, dark green and grey.  However I would like to include a more natural design instead of a very industrial image as the theme of our song is annihilation and apocolypse.



Creative Task- Magazine Advert.

In class today we have looked at making a magazine advert by looking at the branding of an artist. To start with we where shown a music video by 'The Courteeners'. The song title is 'Take Over the World'.

After watching the video for the second time we then had to write down ideas or iconography that was triggered from the video. We were also given dates that we had to include on a magazine advert that sells an upcoming gig for a new album. The dates and venues are as follows:-

• February 21st - Nottingham Rock City.
• February 22nd - Leeds O2 Academy.
• February 23rd - Birmingham O2 Academy.
• February 24th - Liverpool O2 Academy.
• February 25ht- Dundee Fat Sam's.

Whilst making the advert the group had to take into consideration the branding of the band and album and to make the poster draw in the audience. This was done by having similar bands touring with 'The Courteeners' and by naming the tour after the song we were shown. we also included a website for the audience to buy the tickets and used similar iconography to what was shown in the video. This is our advert:-

 

I found this exercise useful as it let me understand that audience and the branding of the band is really important for these adverts. I will apply what I have learnt from this for the album advert that we will make.