Album Cover Research

MUSE - Origin Of Symmetry - (Best Album EVER!)

The main image used was the winner of a competition. Entrants were given the title and the band asked people to design artwork to fit, in addition to the winners, all the artwork in the booklet artwork were the runners up, and some of these runners up featured as single covers for the songs from the album. The image itself is very striking, as it is bright orange. The only pug on the cover is a small white box in the top left corner with the album information in a black sans serif font, which shows that the album cover is less about the bands identity and more to do with the image and the intepretation of the music itself, rather than that of other genres, such as Hip-Hop and R&B where the artist takes prevelance. For Muse this could be said that is their identity, in leaving the listener to think and delve deeper into the music. The image and album title share a disjuncture, in that the image is very insymmetrical.

The back cover is a mere plain white background with the track listing and institutional information in black underneath, the back cover then only exists to inform the listener of the tracks and not provide any more imagery for the listener to think about.

The inside sleeve features the runners up of the competition, along with lyrics from the tracks. It is more a showcase of the art rather than a showcase of the band, as the lyrics only appear on some pages whereas the art is on every page.

This was Muse's second album, but there are no striking differences from the cover design of their first album, Showbiz, other than the art itself. We can't really learn much from the cover alone about the band however, and the genre cannot be defined from just the image.