Same album artists, different decade...(Part 4)

The Prodigy: The Fat Of The Land contains a full colour booklet and it has a lot of pages, with artwork varying from artistic shots of the band members, shots of them preforming live, a cartoon style illustration of them and various other bits including some ants. This shows a lot of effort going into the design of the booklet and shows a high budget. The type used on the album is really cool and bold and shows that the Prodigy are an established band who can afford decent album art.

The booklet for Linkin Park: Hybrid Theory contains black and white photographs of the band and more stencil images, there is also a really cool sketch and an alternative logo which has a Japanese and Hip Hop feel to it. While the artwork is really good, the booklet is made from very rough card and only the cover is colour which shows that they still didn't have a huge budget. The disk is red with the soldier logo, band logo and all the track listings, which makes it look professional. Like I said earlier, having graphic designers in the band is a good way to have great artwork without spending all your money.

The booklet for Deftones: White Pony is a nice glossy booklet, but is in black and white (similar to the booklet for Diamond Eyes) obviously done for effect, rather than budget as the photographs of the band members are quite artistic. The booklet has an image on one page, then a black page with the song name and lyrics printed in a similar way to how it is done in the booklet for Diamond Eyes. The album doesn't come across as budget with such a nice booklet so obviously a bit of money was spent on the album, even with the use of minimalism.

The Alexisonfire album has a small fold out with the track names and lyrics (using the same font as the album) and has a small bit of artwork with a quote from one of the songs, showing that there was a very small budget for the album art, but it helps give it the punk/hardcore aesthetic.

The Rise Against booklet carries on the artwork that it has used on the cover and is made out of really nice glossy paper. The booklet is nice to look through and is nice to hold so effort has been put into the design of the booklet and the artwork itself.

As you would expect from the Motion City Soundtrack cover, the booklet is very low budget and just contains the album credits and a very small picture of the band.

So after looking at the album art from albums previous to the ones I looked at last week, in most cases the artwork has got much better, even though we are in a time where most people download the music and don't care about the artwork anymore. This is mainly due to the artists becoming more successful, but at the same time it feels that they appreciate their real fans and they know their real fans will go out and buy the CD and will look through the artwork and it means that design for music is not completely on it's way out.