Album Cover Art

The purpose of album artwork is to promote the album and describe its content to an audience in a single glance, it must establish the genre and identity of the artist through codes and conventions. The cover is the primary selling point of every album, its intent is to attract the consumer by grabbing their attention with appealing imagery and innovative styles. Album artwork can be unique to the artist, hold their iconic image or it can simply follow the typical conventions of all album artwork. The primary four typical conventions of album artwork are;

• artist name


• album title


• a central image


• the artist

In most cases the artist is themselves used as the central image. It is often common in debut albums for them to be self titled.