Research into CD Covers and Adverts

The Foals are a similar band to our band, The Factory in the way they look and their style of music with a similar indie genre. The foals use a distinct way of producing an album cover so that they are recognised just by their font. They use two particular fonts. The first font that they used on their album and singles released before this represents them being young and is slightly ‘out-there’ which is shown in the picture below. This font is also used in advertisements about them until they produced their second album.






The second font that they used is plain square capital letters but it gives us the feel that they are mature and sophisticated now. This is used in their second album and also advertisements since their second album release. At this point in their careers they are no longer independent, they have built their fan base and are now more commercialised.



Their CD cover font corresponds with the font that is used in advertisement to produce a sense of identity to the band. This font when looked at acts as a symbolism of the band. This is also the case for other bands such as The Libertines and The Maccabees.






The Libertines for example, also uses a particular font/style of design on the CD covers and adverts. This is that the writing is slightly broken up and put at a slant to each other. This would be to represent their crazy, shambolic ‘do it yourself’ attitude. It is designed to show their individuality rather than be a part of the institutional machine. It also shows that they are highly influenced by the Sex Pistols and ‘punk’.





The Kooks are another band which is similar to ours. They have the same style of music and the same dress sense. And we are highly influenced by them into making our digipak. Taking into account the font of writing which must be continuous and a similar colour scheme on all of ‘The Factory’s’ CD’s we want to use a similar type of style as The Kooks and Arctic Monkeys.

Here are some of there CD covers which they have used.

The Kooks:









It is also show through adverts that the same theme pursue for example, in the Glastonbury Advert below, the same font is used as well as the black, grey and white colour scheme.




Arctic Monkeys:








As you can see, they have a running theme of black, grey and white. We however, also want to represent our bands image within this album artwork and show that although they are more sophisticated and mature, they still have a ‘messy’ streak about them.

This CD cover below is the biggest influence to us and after discussing, we have decided to do a black and white photo of our band (to show sophistication) with a font to show their influences (perhaps slightly 60’s) as they are clearly influenced by guitar bands of the 60s such as ‘Love’ and ‘The Stooges’. Although they are not widely know, they have a sizeable cult following and base their music on bands which they like as they know that their target audience/fan base will also appreciate these artists. We also want to make a coffee ring/spill effect on the corner of the CD’s front cover.