Poster Analysis:Investigating Album Posters

Before we began analysing the posters we identified the codes and conventions of a poster, if we look at the basic codes and convention of a poster there is predominantly:

- A general colour code

-An image

- Text

If we narrow down these basics to a particular medium we are promoting, in our case music videos we need:

-a colour code that complements the given genre of the song i.e if we are promoting a hiphop song we want bold colours that stand out such as blue, red, black etc, where as if we were promoting a ballad we may wan to use subtle colours that are soft in order to promote the smoothness and slowness of the song such as mint green or teal

-An image of our artist(s)

-Text that promotes the release of the song, or what dates the artist(s) is touring but also focusing on the font style and whether it is Serif or Sans Serif, in order to again, complement the genre of the song.

If we look at a variety of artist's who have different music genres we can see the contrast between the visual illustration to fit the given genre.

For instance:

Ellie Goulding's music is predominantly indiepop/electropop so here we see predominatly warm tone colours such as pinks and oranges we als see cool colours such as blue and purples (which is simulatneously a combination of cool and warm). This emphasies the softness of her music as the colours blend from one side of the spectrum (cool) to the other (warm). By doing this we can interpret that her genre could be a combination of contemporary R&B and Indie. The image we see of her in overlayed with the gradient of colours, combined with her directly looking at us. The text used is sans serif to illustrate the difference between her music and a ballad for instance, her name is strategically placed above her in centre form with her logo parallel to her tattoo.

If we then look at Artic Monkeys poster, there is a bold difference between the too types of Indie genre.

Artic Monkeys' genre is a combination of Indie Rock; Garage Rock; Post-punk revival and Psychedelic rock.

The the colour scheme is just black and white, completing opposite in terms of the spectrum, unlike Ellie Goulding it doesnt have a gradient. The connotstion of black forthis particular poster suggests a hardness towards the style of music but the white font illustrates a softness and purity to the styl of music. we only see the name of the band in a sans serif font and their logo. Simple, but eefective in terms of communicating well with their audience.

Lastly, looking at Lauryn Hill's poster we only see 4 colours, white, black, red and yellow. Essentially, the image used is an illustration of the artist herself, in a pop art form, simple but effective in terms of creativity as we asscociate the main features (lips, eyes, eyebrows and nose) with the style of music. Stereotypically, we can gather from her features she is from Afro-Carribbean descent, allowing us to associate her features with the genre of R&B/soul as R&B stands for Rhythm and Blues, commonly linked with coloured people. The font is sans serif in order to empahsis the statement her music is trying to get across but also to add a sleek and clean feel to her given genre.

In class, we depicted 3posters of artists focusing on the keyterms:

~Anchorage

~Connotation

~Denotation

~Intertexuality

~Preferred Reading

~Negotiated Reading

I did Madonna's "Celebration" poster.

Individually, we were given 10 minutes to annote our chosen poster; once we did this we then grouped together with other students who picked the same poster and discussed what we found and how it contributed to selling the product, in our case 'Madonna'. Once those 10 minutes were up we then explained each of our posters to the rest of the class to explain what we found when depicting the poster, once explained the other students were given the opportunity to ask us critical evauation questions, such as: Does it communicate effectively with the audience?;In your opinion have you arrived at the preferred or negotiated meaning;How would you improve your given poster etc.

In doing this, we were able to maximise our level of thinking within the hiddn meanings of each aspect found in a poster and also to help develop our creativity when wanting to apply what we've learnt to our own posters, and digipacks.

#research