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The Changing Landscape of Album Design

October 18, 2010

I remember the first album cover that truly grabbed my attention: Meatloaf’s Bat Out of Hell. Why my dad had a Bat Out of Hell LP, I don’t know. What I do know is that image of a guy on the chopper bursting out of hell in a cemetery on the cover, made me think, “I need to listen to this record.”

The Changing Landscape of Album Design

Such is the power of album art. It draws the viewer in. It can expand the story of the album. It can increase album sales. In some cases it can even achieve legendary status, like Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon or the Beatles’ Abbey Road. For years, designers have worked alongside musicians and record labels to create imagery and packaging that brings an album to completion. However, the landscape of album art is changing drastically with the rise of iTunes and similar digital music providers, and as graphic designers we need to adapt.

Album Sales Figures

If we look at Soundscan’s 2009 stats for music sales in the United States, there are a few numbers that jump out.

Music sales overall went up 2.1% – good news for the music industry and thus for the design industry.
Digital singles sold 8.3% more than the previous year, and digital albums themselves rose 16.1%.
Vinyl sales climbed 33%, but still only make up 1.6% of total sales (2.5 million units compared to 1.55 billion units).
297.6 million physical albums were sold; of this, 76.4 million were digital albums.

What do these numbers tell us? Basically, digital sales continue to rise while physical album sales continue to decline. Read the whole article >

Simple SEO Checklist for Web Designers

September 20, 2010

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is and always will be a bit of a mystery. Google, the king of search engines and what everyone shoots to be at the top of, is constantly changing their algorithm to avoid being “gamed”. However, there are a few simple best practices that are proven to improve search engine rankings – practices that are relatively easy for web designers to implement.

Simple SEO Checklist for Web Designers

The competitiveness of the web design industry these days means it isn’t enough just to build a site for a client that looks good and is usable; we have to offer everything we can to our clients in order to remain relevant and recommendable. One way to do this is to offer an SEO-friendly site. Of course, an SEO-friendly site starts with the must-haves: clean and organized code. If you’re not building websites with clean, organized code, you shouldn’t be charging people for your services. With that said, here is a simple SEO checklist for web designers. Before you launch your site, make sure you’ve implemented these steps and you’re on the road to an SEO-friendly site!

1. Define a Few Keyword Phrases

Defining keyword phrases off the top ensures the goals have been set and you’re focused from the very beginning of the project. Don’t go overboard; two or three phrases is acceptable to optimize for, and I’d recommend using the Google Search-Based Keyword Tool to ensure you’re not optimizing for highly-competitive phrases or phrases that are rarely searched for.

When I write about “optimizing phrases”, I’m talking about the phrases people may use to find the website. For example, a design company might want to optimize for the phrase “Web Design [cityname]” or “Print Design [cityname]“. However, depending on the city, these may be very highly-competitive phrases, so be sure to do your research and be sure to include your client. They know their business better than you, after all. Once these phrases are defined, you can use them in link titles, image titles, and copy (where it makes sense; don’t overdo it, because Google will smack you down).

2. Use Proper Meta Information

Meta information – specifically, keywords and description – don’t carry the weight that they used to, but they are still important to implement. Don’t keyword-stuff – stick to the aforementioned two to three defined phrases – and write a concise but clear meta description. Preferably, write a meta description that has the main keyword phrase you’re targeting in it.

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Must-Have Software for Designers

September 13, 2010

Every day I get up, have coffee and breakfast, and sit down at my computer for my day’s work. I’m pretty much glued to my screen, and during that 8 (10…12… depends on the day) hour day, I use a large variety of software. Because a large part of the livelihood of the graphic and/or web designer depends on the quality and reliability of the software he/she uses, I thought it would be useful to outline the software I use and consider to be “must-have”. Some I use daily; others I don’t use quite so often, but they’re still worth outlining. Hopefully you find this useful, and hopefully you share other pieces of software you think might help others too!

Some are free; some are not; all are useful.

Caffeine

Caffeine doesn’t let your Mac go to sleep. All you do is click a little coffee cup icon in your top toolbar. Simple, useful and free.

Backblaze

Backblaze is a cloud-based file backup system. For $5 a month, we have unlimited storage that is constantly backed up. After all, having multiple drives backed up in your workspace isn’t going to do anything if your office burns down.

Hit the jump for more must-have design software! Read the whole article >

The Death of the Print-Only Freelance Designer

August 30, 2010

The print-only freelance designer is a dying breed. There, I said it. If you’re a freelance designer who doesn’t have web-related skills, you best add that arrow to your quiver or you’re going to be left in the dust. Now, it’s worth noting that I’m not saying “print design is dead” or “identity design is dead”. As long as there are businesses, artists, musicians and the like, graphic designers will be needed. However, freelance designers who only operate in the print realm aren’t long for this world.

The Death of the Print-Only Freelance Designer

The digital realm is growing and spreading, and at the expense of the print world. As the opportunities for print work shift over to digital work, so do those print jobs. The numbers show the shift: Amazon sold 143 ebooks for every 100 hardcover books in the second quarter of 2010. In the music industry, album sales fell 12.7% in 2009 while digital singles rose 8.3% and digital albums rose 16.1% (source). These are only two industries, but two big ones – and they point towards the growing trend towards digital over print. It should be noted that overall, people still currently buy more physical albums and physical books, so it’s not like we should erase the section of our brains that holds our print design information right now. However, the numbers don’t lie: digital is growing, print is declining.

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Designing Past the Logo

August 9, 2010

Like many of our readers, we end up doing quite a bit of work for smaller businesses. Personally, I love working with small businesses: you usually have one solid contact, you can relate to one another, and you can usually skip the bureaucracy and red tape that sometimes comes with working for larger companies. However, the common downside is that small businesses might not have the budget to pay for a full identity overhaul – logo, business cards, print material etc. The result is that the designer may only work on a logo, or may work on the identity system in pieces. This is fine, but one trick we’ve learned that I’d like to share is something we call “designing past the logo”.

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