Planning: The Making of The Album Cover

When I was thinking about the designs for my media product, I realised that an album cover was a necessity to appeal to audiences. I did a lot of research when considering what to produce on the front cover and realised that there was a common theme amongst a lot of album names: they usually had a song in the album that related to it. For example, Mumford and Sons newest album Delta had a song called Delta on the album, suggesting to me that I could use this for my own product by having the album name relate to the song or part of it. I knew that I wanted to use Girl With One Eye by Florence and the Machine for my media piece but decided to change the name of the song to You made Me Cry for the music video as I knew it would be easier to brand as a song. I, therefore, settled on the name of the album being cry. I decided to do it in all lowercase to represent the helplessness women feel during sexual assault and when they cry, and therefore, these empowering songs are sung to help those women feel better and more confident about themselves.
Studying album artwork, I noticed that there were themes and the majority of the time, the album names related to either the artists or the name of the album. Such as with Florence and the Machine's album Lungs, the album artwork is of Florence with lungs on her chest and therefore I decided to emulate this with my own artwork.

I first began to imagine what sort of image came to mind when I thought of the word cry and immediately thought of tears so I felt as though I should incorporate tears into my work somehow. I began with the idea of big blue tears drawn on someone's checks to exaggerate on the idea of crying and to emphasis the tears themselves and immediately loves this idea but decided I didn't like it done on a person as shown.

Instead, I took to Paint and designed my own image which I ended up liking a lot more as I felt it had a homemade feel to it, suggesting at an independent aesthetic and felt it fit the brand identity I was aiming for a lot better.