Album Artwork: What Should Be Included?

As we're beginning to consider our design for our album artwork, we briefly discussed elements of an album that you'll find on nearly every album. We made two lists stating what we need to include and what we should consider in our design.

Album artwork must include:

- The artist's name

- The album name

- A colour scheme that is reflected in the 
  rest of the campaign i.e. music videos and 
  website

- Song/track list

- Barcode

- Studio/leal information

- Warning if there is explicit content

Things to consider:

- What star image you are creating

- Do the artist appear on the cover? -- genre convention

- The layout of each panel i.e the rule of 
  thirds

- Composition of the frame -- 
  foreground/background

- Font

- The link between the four panels and 
  spine

- The link to the other elements of the
  campaign

In order to gain a better understanding of what we should be producing, we looked at some examples from previous years: