Jus Drein Jus Daun Update

I decided to go for a double exposure effect, and added a blurred tree overlay to break up the white of the background,

IN STEP -- Where My Armour Ends Album Cover

See the creation video here

For the album cover, I decided to go with an old VHS-type style. I drew inspiration from Halsey's Room 93 cover, using the idea of distorting the image. I chose to use TV scan lines as the background, because it has a low amount of detail and would be good for creating a simple textured background. Images with a plain-coloured background seem too neat, and I wanted to go for a messy, more grungy feel. I used a custom pattern to fill the image with lines, and then used a noise generator which was built into Photoshop to add the noise overlay.

The retro distortion effect was accomplished by changing the outputs of the red, green and blue channels of the text and misaligning the copies slightly. I then sheared the bottom half of the text to make it look even more distorted.

Another example of the retro distortion effect
(http://image.shutterstock.com/z/stock-vector-color-distortion-alphabet-vector-339694445.jpg)

 

Making the Album Cover (Video)

In this video, I speedpaint the album cover for IN STEP's Where My Armour Ends.

Album Design

Title: Where My Armour Ends
Artist: In Step

Tracklist:

1. Skin
2. Our City
3. Backwards (Pt. I)
4. Backwards (Pt. II)
5. Empty Horizons (feat. Sam Tsui)
6. Shades Of Grey
7. Hurricane
8. Bring Me The Night
9. Shadows
10. No Way
11. Out Of Time
12. C'mon
13. DKLA (Acoustic Cover)

I chose to call the album Where My Armour Ends, because a lot of alternative albums have metaphysical names such as Beneath The Skin, Come Alive and Make A Shadow.

The duo's name is IN STEP, because the two of them are in tune with each other and play music as part of one whole unit.

The album design may include the tracklist faded across the cover.

Existing Indie Album Covers

Badlands (Halsey)

BADLANDS uses a colourised style, which is a little posterised. The BADLANDS text is covering her eyes, which could symbolise how the audience is listening to her description of the 'badlands'--everything wrong with society--through her eyes. The obscuring of the eyes could also represent that she is nobody in comparison to the atrocities of the badlands and that she can't do anything about it.

Room 93 (Halsey)

ROOM 93 uses a similar colourised style, using cyan and magenta. The image is small, like looking through a window. It could symbolise Halsey inviting the audience into her world. Her name is prominent on the cover, and the colours are inverted when the text obscures the window to create contrast. The cover is slightly distorted.

I Of The Storm (Of Monsters And Men)

This cover is made up of a simple logo on a textured background. The logo is a sharp eye, representing the idea of the 'eye of the storm' referenced in the title. The group's name isn't used on the cover--only the stylised acronym.