After researching album covers by various singer songwriters, all of the covers I found were photography based. This is a very generic signifier of my artist's genre of acoustic, singer songwriter.
This is because the use of photography with this genre reinforces the expression of emotion that is representative of the genre, often presented within the lyrics.
The photography itself is usually emotive in the way that lighting is strong, highly contrasted, very bright lights and deep darks.
The colour is usually altered, sometimes black and white (Crosby Loggins, Time To Move) or reduced saturation to make the colour of the image weaker (Matthew McMahon, Too Big To Fail; James Morrison, Undiscovered).
The composition of image is fairly simple, following the rule of thirds considering direction of strong lines (Crosby Loggins with the path and fence creating a vanishing point, James Morrison Song For You, Truths For Me with the kerb disecting the image diagonally) and position of subjects (Pete Yorn and Scarlett Johansson with the positions of the two singers, Matthew McMahon with the singer positioned more to the bottom third of the image).
Something that occurs across all the album artworks is that the artist/band is always pictured. This is an important factor for my artist's genre, as this makes the album more personal, which is representative of the genre.
In my album artwork, I'll aim to incorporate these points into the designs. I'll use photography of the artist and subjects relative to the song, for instance a cityscape photograph. I'll compose the image using the rule of thirds and keep the image simple yet reinforcing of the emotions of the song, and I'll adjust the colour to suit both the genre and the image.
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