Can Album Covers Predict Web Design Trends?
Staying on top of current web design trends can feel like a daunting task, but what if there was a way to predict the direction we’re moving in?
As technology advances so do the opportunities to use these new applications when designing websites, such as voice control. An up-and-comer in web design for a while now, voice control has hit the big leagues with popular voice assistants like Alexa and Siri. While these trends often rely upon what technology is available and its ease of use, visual web design trends don’t always have such a clear reason for their newfound popularity.
This is where album covers come in.
In an age of digital media, why does album art matter more than ever? Long gone are the days of rifling through crates of vinyl records to find new music. So why does carefully crafted album art still exist?
While we all know the phrase ‘don’t judge a book by its cover’, we’ve all been guilty of allowing visual appearance influence our initial thoughts on something. Whether it be a picture of food on a menu, the clothes somebody wears, or literally the cover of a book — our first visual impression of something can often directly correlate to our opinion of it.
For better or for worse, the power of a first impression will never change. Which is why good visual design will always be an important part of album covers or creating a great website.
Album cover art, much like web design, is intended to invoke an emotion and attract viewers to interact with it. And while the artistic flair of an album cover may seem distant from the more practical intention of a website, they both use many of the same key design elements.
Key Elements of Web Design & Album Covers
Successful web design and album cover art strive to attract a certain type of viewer with their conscious aesthetic. To do this, they both use key design elements to convey their message.
Imagery & Style
The role of images and photography in web design has only grown since the internet started. Today, imagery plays one of the most important factors of a websites design. Using purposeful images can help with everything from establishing your websites aesthetic style to selling products.
Album covers have been using imagery to accomplish these feats far before the invention of the World Wide Web. Evoking the emotions that music can make you feel with an image is no easy task. However, album covers have been accomplishing this since the 1930s, when pioneering designers saw the illustrated covers they created led to increased record sales.
Colour
Colour is another significant tool album covers employ to create emotion-based responses.
The use of colours and their psychological undertones hasn’t been lost on web design either. One example is blue is often used on healthcare websites because of its ability to symbolize trust, loyalty, wisdom, or intelligence.
Typography
Typography and fonts hold an incredible power on the aesthetics of web design. A bold sans-serif typeface can make website headers seem futuristic while serifed fonts call to mind a more tasteful or classic feel. Album covers often use fewer words than a website but require the words they do use to have more emotional weight.
Design for Multiple Sizes
With the multitude of streaming platforms available for people to discover music on now, it’s necessary for album covers to be more adaptable than ever. Album covers aren’t only displayed in stores, on CD’s or records, but in smaller digital format sizes as well. The move to digital formats leads to the lose of some typography elements on covers because the title and artist may already be shown as text underneath the artwork.
Web design is also required to be more responsive because of the variety of devices used to access the internet. What works on a desktop won’t look good on a smaller phone screen and vice-versa. Which means now the viewing device of the user is much more important.
Trends in Web Design & Newly Released Albums
A quick Google search will bring you up-to-date on all the latest web design trends and what the future landscape of websites is moving to. To demonstrate the visual links between web design and album covers here are the Top 10 Web Design Trends for 2020 (from Wix):
- Oversized type and elements
- Split-screen content
- Solid colour blocks
- Plenty of whitespace
- Exposed grid and windows
- Fluorescent 3D digital artwork
- Overlapping layers
- Motion and interactivity
- Fullscreen forms
- Tailored illustrations
Just try scrolling through the New Releases section on Spotify and you’ll see countless examples of these web design trends in use already.
Can Album Covers Predict Web Design Trends?
While album covers and web design have a lot in common with each other, they aren’t directly influencing one another. Graphic trends like we see in web design are highly reflective of the time and culture we live in today. Like any piece of visual design, you have to look into the era it was created for a full explanation on the contextual relevance of its aesthetic.
Music holds a large influence on the lifestyle of any given period in time. This influence, in turn, proliferates into the daily life of artists and designers in that time as well. With the vast amount of music available online now, album covers are created faster than ever before. This mass content creation is reflected in web design and its rapid growth too.
So next time you find yourself trying to stay on top of current web design trends — try browsing the latest album releases and you’ll probably find a little more in common than you thought.
By Harlen Malkowich