How to make a cd cover by listenting to music

The university student describes how they made a cd cover as part of their project. They had to listen to music and draw abstract responses to the music. From this they had to create three cd covers. The project was divided into two parts.

Stage 1


In the first part they listen to music and and they had to take an A4 page and draw a simple visual language of what they heard. They could only do this by using simple elements of line, shape and colour. It had to be a non representational, abstract design and they could only use the 6 spectrum colours ( red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple ).

Below you can see the 4 visual responses after listening to the music.

• The first was a slow, smooth, soft and calm watery type song.
• The second song was a upbeat funky song.
• The third was a hard rough death metal rock song.
• Fourth was an electronic digital sounding song.

Stage 2
Then they had to discuss their results with their peers and brainstormed different ideals about what design they are going to choose and finally they chose to do a 3D design.
 
 
They decided to use one word to describe the type of music that the band played. They then used that word as the main piece on the front cover. They chose the word smooth for the calm music and the word rough for the heavy metal music and the word Digital for the electric music. They used the 3D programme Xara3D, photoshop and illustrator to create the CD cover.
 
 
In the final design below they decided to use the colours blue and green for the Smooth design, in the Rough design they have used the colour red and in the Digital they have used a bright coloured design.


 



I think it is interesting to compare the visual design to the final designs.



Website: http://justcreativedesign.com/2008/05/10/how-to-design-a-cd-cover-by-listening-to-music/