well, if you say so.

oooh i *wonder*, whatever could it beee…

ps. love the provisional design for it. it just says.. "i care", you know?

cheers

Mark

Fair enough, I’ll blame them then.

(Well, mostly, as it’d be nice to see a dash of colour in there to catch the eye more.)

I just think it’s a huge shame (and likely to the band’s disadvantage in sales) that we’ve got cover swaps coming this late in the day. It’s something that ideally wants careful initial planning.

Obviously, though, it’s far from an ideal world, in marketing or anything else. It’s good to hear that the current approach will be stuck to with the next single.

> As for the website I think were looking at also bringing
> it more in line with the now agreed upon artwork and
> also make it a bit speedier

Please, please work on the design (usability and use of space) more than the images / colours / reinventing the wheel with javascript.

All the best with it.

Yeah, pirates. Sorry, I’m used to looking at things on a number of levels and dissecting ‘em automatically. Just trying to explain how I got to the conclusion "It’s fucking awful enough…" — I wasn’t just saying I didn’t like the image.

fwiw the US one was done by Adria Petty (her page on it), and i just noticed a few days ago that it’s made from this photo. herself and ilovedust do seem to work together alot though.

The maintained design element — the textured scratchwork/canvas background — isn’t a bad starting point, it just wants a dash of something else to get attention initially.

I’d maintain that completely changing the cover of an *already-released* album a couple of months after it was first issues is a poor PR move. Anyone who ends up with a duplicate copy (due to mistake by themselves or by a friend/relative buying it for them) is likely to look less favourably on future releases, a person buying for them will be less inclined to buy music on someone else’s behalf, etc.

People also use cover art as a means of telling whether they’re looking at the right album online, and a lot of sales are conducted online these days. Anything which causes a double-take or misapprehension amongst potential customers is Not A Good Thing. The different covers for Lottery Winners On Acid (many sites still showing the EP/2002 cover) already lost some sales, I’d wager.

(There’s also the unfortunate fact that a skull-and-crossbones design these days signifies rap music to a lot of people, but that’s a fairly minor point.)

I think the changes are coming because either UK promotion or the band themselves are experimenting… and to be honest, the two-colour designs may actually look unusual enough that they stand out on the shelf, and if they’d been adopted from the beginning then I could see it working as a form of branding.

Retroactive/parallel works (to some extent) with books and comics — particularly when selling to two age demographics — but music purchasers tend to like their feed as clear and unambiguous as possible. Partly because they’re paying more per unit of product, but mostly because they don’t *want* to have to think "is this the right CD?"

In terms of representing the music, I’d say the US album cover does the band most favours: a dash of colour to focus the eye centrally, small sans serif label at the top indicating "modern, intelligent alt.indie"…

The UK 2005 cover isn’t bad… the blue and the gradients suggest a certain amount of richness, although the image overpowers the band/album names.

The ‘red’ cover… the nicest thing I can say about it is that the band name is clearly visible when shrunk down (say, in an online store) and it reminds me a lot of a friend’s photography. It doesn’t really feel as if it has any connection to the album.

But anyway, yeah, late change and confusion of potential customers = bad.

ilovedust again, by any chance?

It’s fucking awful enough…