Heart-Based Album Covers

The above albums all have artwork based around hearts, although all in different ways. I think the Kanye West cover is meant purely to be abstract and strange. He has this persona of being arrogant, and I think that having an album cover that's pretty empty reflects his arrogant personality by almost showing a lack of effort. At the same time I do think the strong contrast works very well.

The example cover has a different angle. It shows him destroying a heart, and the ribbons and confetti that come out of the heart suggest it's a good thing via the connotations of celebration. By doing this it reflects the rebellious nature the artist wants to give off. Also, by having the heart at the angle, we only see one full half of it, which is suggesting he's heartbroken, and yet the fact that he's destroying it could be interpreting him 'kickstart'ing his phase of getting over it.

The Kings of Leon Cover is meant to depict two birds of prey fighting with each other. Clearly it's a very abstract depiction, but that goes with the bands music as a strange mix of Indie and Rock. The colours are very strong, the red and black represent blood and the night respectively, suggesting the two go hand in hand with each other by the composition and the name of the album.

The Scouting For Girls cover is a lot more literal than the rest. It cleverly uses negative space to create a heart-shaped light between two people, which creates a very literal depiction of the album name, whilst still having a visual that works strongly because of the contrast of silhouettes against a light background.

This is the single for The Frays cover of Heartless by Kanye West. I find this of particular interest and importance to my project because Kanye West and The Fray have completely different styles of music, and so I'd have thought their album covers would be completely different, but that's not the case. Also, the fact that it's a re-design of a cover makes it a strong example to the project. I think this cover is very clever, the original Kanye West artwork shows an empty balloon, something which stretches and doest break easily, whereas the Frey chose to use a light bulb, the complete opposite to this. The shattered glass represents a shattered heart, due to someone being heartless. Also, by including the screw bit of the bulb, a visual focal point is created from which the heart splits into two directions, creating connotations of separations. All in all, this is a very clever cover as it shows a complete heart, yet every connotation refers to a broken one.