In our previous design exercise, the Bluewave creative team played a game of Record Roulette, creating album art with randomly-generated band names, album titles, and images. When sharing our final pieces, Art Director Martin suggested we keep the momentum going and do a Part 2 of this exercise. The plan: In a throwback to music stores and mail-order record clubs, create a poster advertising the albums created by all designers in the last exercise. The goal: experiment with design techniques, mix multiple design aesthetics into one piece, and, as always, have fun!

Throwback Album Poster creative exercise:

1. Create/find album art. Create your own by doing the Record Roulette design exercise. Alternately, grab the 12 most recently uploaded pieces from the Cover Art Archive. Hopefully you’ll get a variety of design styles and music genres.
2. Get inspired. Check out these vintage posters for mail-order record clubs. Remember when music stores were a mall staple? Watch some Sam Goody commercials from 1985 and walk through the last store closing in 2012.
3. Start designing. Combine your album art into one poster that showcases the breadth of your music selections. Try a new Photoshop or Illustrator technique while you’re at it!

Here are Bluewave’s posters, in no particular order:

Getting the juices flowing and thinking outside of the box is the name of the game with these Chompathons (read more about them here). To get those cobwebs out. And I feel like we succeeded here, and may even touch on it again. What do you think, would you stop in to buy a record?

By: Ben Grefsrud | Art Director