Digipak research

Smash mouth album art & similar artists.

When grouped together it becomes clear that Smash Mouth have integrated a certain style into their artwork across all their albums over the past couple of decades. They feel old, as though they were made in the 60’s or 80’s with quite a retro feel about them. In addition they all have quite an amateur finish to them, but it’s possible that this is intended as it may link to the band themselves being quite funny and comical, and maybe not typical ‘pop stars’ but more middle aged men that are in a moderately successful band.

Not all the covers feature the band themselves, but the few that do once again capture a more laid back, fun image of the band with them pulling faces at the camera or even in cartoon form.

Another convention which seems to run throughout their album work is bright colours. This use of bold, vibrant colours such as blues, reds, oranges and greens gives the band certain connotations as it suggests confidence and fun, since the colours are bright and uplifting. This is then translated into their music through lyrics and tempo, as well as the personas of the band members themselves. While the colours reflect a culture of cartoon and pop art, the compositions of the album covers are usually quite simple, perhaps to allow for the strong colour palette.

Another aspect which we picked up on as a group when analysing the existing bands artwork is that the font’s used as Album Titles are, in our opinion, very average and ‘gimmicky’, as though they’ve just fonts taken from word art and placed over the image.

As well as giving the band a style and an identity, their designs are clever in that they allow the digipaks stand out against others in retail environments due to the bright colours and simple eye catching compositions.

Finally, many of their album covers show a direct, explicit link to the album title. For example, in ‘Astro Lounge’ the cover is an image of a tall skyscraper rising up from a planet into space. Often these buildings have lounges and members areas on the top floors as they have the best views, suggesting the cover is showing a ‘lounge’ in space, which relates to the morpheme ‘astro’.

• 1. Bold, vibrant colours• 2. Cartoon or animated effect• 3. Light hearted/funny• 4. Simple in design• 5. Amateur font• 6. Association with Title

Smash mouth conventions

Bowling for soup

Bowling For Soup or BFS are an American rock band originally from Texas, and in terms of genre can be described as rock, pop, pop-punk and comedy rock. This idea of ‘comedy rock’ is interesting as it’s definition is the use of parody

or satire comedy, therefore making it a perfect term to describe the style that Smash Mouth and similar artists are channelling through the certain

conventions I’ve been discussing.

BFS started out in 1994, the same year that Smash Mouth were originally formed. This suggests that their style is something which was perhaps

popular at the time (explaining the old fashioned artwork and basic but comical music videos), and they’ve just carried it through into their more

recent work as it’s become what they’re known for and wouldn’t be able to compete with current artists if they were to try something different.

Like Smash Mouth, Bowling for soup feature themselves in many of their covers being silly and informal, such as here where the use of armbands on a grown man is used in conjunction with the mid-dive comical facial expressions to create a comical scene that mocks itself. Again the colours are vibrant, contrasting and cheerful.

The font convention found in Smash Mouth’s albums appears to be more of a general convention linked to this type of band as Bowling for Soup’s albums also feature similar font types and placement.

Here we can see the use of cartoon filters and effects, another style that Smash Mouth uses. It also creates a relationship between the album title ad the illustration, as the movies have an association with animation and cartoons.

Sugar Ray

Sugar ray were formed a little earlier in 1986, and again have links to the rock and pop punk genres. Their first album cover was for the album floored released in 1998 and is shown below. The style of it again is similar to Smash Mouth’s with bright colours and

quite a cartoon-y finish, this time relating to the idea of video games. It’s more complicated than others I’ve analysed but they seem to simplify over time.

Again in Sugar ray’s albums we can see this use of font that looks old fashioned, although they seem to keep it more consistent than Smash Mouth across their album/track covers.

The simplicity of the composition in this cover gives it quite an amateur, old fashioned feel as it suggests that whoever designed and produced it didn’t have access to modern technology that can create high quality, polished images with a range of fonts and editing tools. Having said this the album above (14.59) containing the single every morning was released in 1999, explaining why it may feel a bit behind the times. However, their most recent album released in 2009 has a very similar style, and this continuity suggests their covers to be designed this way on purpose as it’s become their branding and their image.