Picture this: you enter a record store on a late afternoon to look for new music and can’t help but be mesmerized by the dazzling art that’s everywhere - on vinyl casings, CD covers, on the walls. When you take a closer look, you notice how different and diverse each piece is, much like in a museum. And you can’t help but wonder if there are any critics for this type of art as well.

That circumstance is what inspired me to create this website.

What is this website about? - A general overview

This website is all about typefaces as seen on album covers. An album title can tell you a lot about the artist’s intentions and creative concept overall, and oftentimes this aspect of design gets overlooked by potential buyers and even critics.

What am I aiming to achieve with this website?

I am aiming to paint a simpler picture upon the link between typefaces and genre, as well as typography and artists’ charisma overall, as they pair to create the art you see on cover albums.

What should you expect to find on this website?

You will find on this website an analysis on how typography has been used to develop effective covers throughout a wide range of genres (pop, hip-hop, rap, rock, reggae, gospel to name a few) as well as eras of music. Critical comparrisons have been made based on how good or bad a typeface has been in a certain time and genre.

All about logo and banner image

I decided to keep the vintage, old-school vibe you would usually find in a record store and combine that with a modern, contemporary style you would expect to find on a website. The colour palette I chose resembles the vintage aesthetic of the 70s, with muted, earthy, contrasting tones. The logo is reminiscent of a vinyl that’s coming out of a casing, on which I have placed the innitials of the website name. For that, I used the HFF Black Steel typeface in Regular. Similarly, the banner showcases a hand shuffling through a bunch of vinyl records. I used white for the the name of the website to contrast the dreamy, low brightness background. I chose a sans seriff font with the intention of making the website come accross as approachable, modern and clean; the decorative aspect the seriff brings is replaced by the creative logo and detailed images.

The name of the website

The name of the website is pretty self-explanatory and hints at what you would find by reading the articles - Beyond Covers, as in unravelling the designer’s intentions.