Ancillary Work [Researching Similar Artists]

In preparation for making our digipak, I looked into similar artists and bands that
The Jewellers should take inspiration from. As we are an indie group we can minimize
the lists of genre's and use the resources on the web to find the bands we need.

Artists Like Us - Their Album Covers

1.
Arctic Monkeys

Our biggest inspirations, The Arctic Monkeys.
Over their five albums, they feature on only one of their covers, the 2009 album, Humbug. In that image barely any of the bands face is visible which makes the indie vibe very obvious.

The rest of the covers have very little links to the band themselves, and the classic font changes throughout the albums until they dump it and have a plain text or graphic.

This means, for the Jewellers we have the choice of having a subtle picture, or leave the picture and go for a plain text or graphic



2.
Franz Ferdinand

Franz Ferdinand, also like the Arctic Monkeys, only feature on one of their album covers. The first two keep the pattern of using text as a key part of the cover.
The 1st, 2nd and 4th all have dark base colours to keep with their indie vibe.
All the albums have their record label Domino logo in one corner of the album. Franz Ferdinand and the Arctic Monkeys are both on Domino so that could be an idea for The Jewellers.


These further the idea that The Jewellers have the choice between faces or no faces. The ratio is 1:3 for text / graphic though.



3.
The Vaccines 

The Vaccines are quite different to the Arctic Monkeys and Franz Ferdinand in terms of the album covers, as there are images of people on every cover. There are quite a lot of singles and EP's that I haven't included because these four <-- are their main albums.
The first two follow a similar pattern (reminded me of Rufus T. Barleysheath debut - Songs on the Farm) of a picture in the centre, base colour and band name above. That simplicity is common for indie album covers.
The next two are similar as they feature people.  The first group of people, I'll be honest I have no idea who they are, but the last image is one of the band, so like the last 2 bands we've looked at; 3 album covers of random things and 1 of the band themselves.
I think a pattern is forming.....

4.
Kasabian

Ah what a surprise, three images of graphic and one of the band.
The debut album is just a simple graphic in black and white. It's quite boring actually.
The 2nd has an old looking / jesus looking image that you might see if you looked at the ceiling of a cathedral somewhere. Funnily enough it looks like it has the 'K' (king) sign on a deck of cards like The Jewellers.
The 3rd is the first image of the band dressed up like they've come out of the tudor period or going to a fancy ball.
The final one is just an arty image.


Nothing really different, alas.




-So what have we taken away from this? Great question, we can see that indie bands tend to stick to graphics / text because that's the conventions of that genre. Unlike pop albums that have the artist on 99.9% of their album covers, indie bands tend to shy away from that as they are more about the music than the image.