In this brief we have to design packaging for a cd or vinyl for an album or song of our choosing. The packing needs to include a front and back cover as well as a design for the cd/vinyl and could include an extra item such as a poster or pullout. I chose to make the packaging for an album called Hotel Diablo by Machine Gun Kelly. This is one of my favourite albums and I could see lots of ideas for imagery to represent the music through the pancaking for a vinyl.
Throughout the album MGK refers to a hotel but it’s never visualised in any of the actual packaging for the album. It’s more of a metaphorical hotel which represents his emotions. I wanted to represent this hotel visually as the key theme of the packaging.
I found some reference images of different hotels and buildings to use for inspiration. I wanted to use a comic book style for the hotel. I took specific inspiration from haunted house scenes, comic book hotels and Disney’s Tower of Terror.
In hotels there is often fancy detailing like these below which I wanted to include as a border for the front and back cover.
For a pullout/ poster I wanted to create a devil skull character with a key hole in its head to continue to theme of the hotel.
I wanted to use a key hole design on the vinyl/cd.
Here is my mind-map with initial ideas for each part of the packaging.
I then created roughs for each part. For the front cover I created a few different ideas for how to represent the hotel. The music in the album is quite dark in tone but also has an energy to it with the rich production. For me the best colours to represent the album are dark purples and pink so this is the colour scheme I’m gonna go with. The back cover will be a blue print of the hotel containing the track list to the album. Both these will have a decorative border around them. For the vinyl in want to add a key hole design with similar patterns to the borders to continue to hotel theme. For the pullout booklet I want to make a 2 sided design. The front with have the devil skull with the key hole and the back will have small images to represent each of the songs. I thought I could have these displayed in a windows like the hotel on the cover.
These are initial ideas for images to represent each song.
I combined my 3 roughs to make this composition. I particularly like the way the album title is incorporated into the design by using a gothic style gate.
Another idea I had for the back of the vinyl packaging was to use an image of an old fashioned key with a tag attached which has the track list on it.
Samuel Green Illustration 