In our previous design exercise, the Bluewave creative team played a game of Record Roulette, creating album art with randomly-generated band names, album titles, and images. When sharing our final pieces, Art Director Martin suggested we keep the momentum going and do a Part 2 of this exercise. The plan: In a throwback to music stores and mail-order record clubs, create a poster advertising the albums created by all designers in the last exercise. The goal: experiment with design techniques, mix multiple design aesthetics into one piece, and, as always, have fun!
Throwback Album Poster creative exercise:
- Create/find album art. Create your own by doing the Record Roulette design exercise. Alternately, grab the 12 most recently uploaded pieces from the Cover Art Archive. Hopefully you’ll get a variety of design styles and music genres.
- Get inspired. Check out these vintage posters for mail-order record clubs. Remember when music stores were a mall staple? Watch some Sam Goody commercials from 1985 and walk through the last store closing in 2012.
- Start designing. Combine your album art into one poster that showcases the breadth of your music selections. Try a new Photoshop or Illustrator technique while you’re at it!
Here are Bluewave’s posters, in no particular order:
Getting the juices flowing and thinking outside of the box is the name of the game with these Chompathons (read more about them here). To get those cobwebs out. And I feel like we succeeded here, and may even touch on it again. What do you think, would you stop in to buy a record?