The Album Cover Game

Some of you may have seen this floating around the world of Facebook already. For the non-design user, it may seem like another dumb game to facilitate procrastination, but for the creative professional, the game serves as a great jump-start for the brain. It's also closer to real life then one may think. You're usually going to have a set of elements that you HAVE to use. The client really likes a certain photo, or you have to have that all of those words you have to squeeze in to satisfy legal. Whatever the case may be, these things are simulated in the game. Where the real creativity comes in is how you put these things together, how you add other relevant graphics and of course, typography.
Once again, we turned the game into an art floor challenge. It started out just going back and forth, but then my creative director kicked it up a notch and gave us 5 minutes to create a cover. Don't over-think, just do. As I mentioned before its a wonderful creative tool. Stuck in a design rut? Take 10 or 20 minutes to make album covers and come back to your project. Sometimes your brain just needs a quick change of scenery. Scroll to the end of this post for the rules and links for the game.

Here are a couple of my creations:


And here is some of the art from my very talented coworkers:

Sheena

Jodie

Myra
Jess
Mandy

1 - Go to "wikipedia." Hit “random... Read More”
or click http://en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Special:Random
The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

2 - Go to "Random quotations"
or click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3
The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.

3 - Go to flickr and click on “explore the last seven days”
or click http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days
Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

4 - Use photoshop or similar to put it all together.

5 - Post it to FB with this text in the "caption" and TAG the friends you want to join in. (feel free to untag yourself...)