Secret 7" - Visual Research

As our first live brief we were asked to submit an entry for the Secret 7” competition. The first thing I did was look into existing album covers to gain inspiration and ideas from. I looked a large variety of works from various different styles and genres. 
The first artworks are very graphic which I thought were very intriguing through their ambiguity of meaning, however I later found that work that included photographs was more effective and more powerful.  

The work that combined photographs with text, shapes and effects were much more aesthetically interesting and appealing, more than just graphics or photographs on their own.

Once I hade looked at existing album covers I also looked into the seven songs/artists that were available, and from that I chose to produce a cover for ‘The Don’ by Nas. From making this decision I looked into the existing album artwork for that song as well as Nas’s other album artwork.

The majority of Nas’s other album covers are photographs and images of him, overlaid onto an urban photograph, in most cases a specific set of buildings, presumably Queens.