Misantropia is a small independent band from Brasil. They music style varies a lot, and the result is a great mixture of sounds, but the names of the songs always give out the impression they are about criticizing society, humanity and the system as a whole. The mood is heavy, sometimes sad, sometimes bleak.
I was approached by the band and asked to design the cover for their album The Price of Everything, which will have a very small independent release. The original concept featured a DigiPack type of packaging, but the idea was cut out due to budget restrictions. While Misantropia is still working on the details to set foot on the release, here is the 3D mock-up with the design they approved.
The Front Cover: For the face of the album, a white background, with light shades of gray and distressed texture, was created to represent the emptiness and bleakness of the song meanings. The band name and album title were treated in blue, reinforce the cold, sad aspect of the band's conceptual music. The lines with various thickness are meant to be seen as just a random graphic element at first…
The Spine: …but these lines wrap around the album, going through the left spine...
The Back Cover: …and stretch in the back cover until one can find out they are actually the barcode reaching to the cover. This was chosen to relate to the name of the album, The Price of Everything, since the most commonly known function of the barcode is to contain the price of the product (in fact, the barcode contains a numeric information that is later attached to the price, in the system that reads it).
The Disc: The barcode/graphic element is used throughout the whole piece. The disc also has this information, as well as the back of the front folder. The band will possibly extend this folder into a booklet with few more pages. The proportions between the lines in the barcode were maintained throughout the design, assuring it is fully functional and will display the same information when scanned anywhere on the album's graphical material.
