Album Cover Analysis

Our first reaction to the album artwork was that we associated it to hippy music because of the links to the landscape in the picture: it's free, there's nature and it is colourful and bright. We instantly connected it to an indie band, the sort of band that is played at Glastonbury Festival. The style of of artwork is a kind of avant-garde doodle, which makes it dreamlike, as in doodled in half-sleep. It was designed on a notepad which has connotations of a student or teenage audience. The cover was designed by Jessie LeDoux from Sub Pop Records. There is use of simple typography in bold sans-serif. The cover booklet seems to be telling a story with pictures, which connects to our childhood and the inside is a pop-out dye-cut which making it more 3D and visual. I thought the Album title, 'Chutes too Narrow' could be making a statement about trying to be free as chutes symbolise sliding down swimming pools as a child, but we can't as now we are adults who are too big, not fitting and there are other things oppressing us from being free. We think the general margin of people who would buy this CD would consider themselves as 'hipsters'.

I thought that Beck was an indie/rock band. The Pop-art stickers can also build up the image of the band being free and surreal. The concept of this cover is that the fans can make their own cover, so it stands out from other CDs and gives the fans freedom. This gives more people an incentive to buy it so it was not allowed to be on the album chart in the UK. The plain album cover is Graph paper, which is a way of relaying information. This theme links in with the Album title 'The Information'. The Graph paper also indicates the target audience is students and teenagers in education and as the market for stickers is children.

We thought the genre of music the Chemical Brothers create is Dance, Big Beats and Electronic. We also thought that the style of art was reminiscent of Communist Soviet propaganda posters, which link to thirst for power and poverty due to the aftermath of the War. The image of the fist conveys a sense of power, violence, aggression and dictatorship. The fingers could also link to the album title 'Push the Button', which means to be in charge of the system, a wide range of information, which is shown by the head and the fist made to look like the brain, which store information. We also connected that this is simple calligraphy, which is neat, eye-catching and ordered, like a brain. 

Our first impression was that the blocks were supposed to represent a box of dynamite and that the blue was supposed to represent a clear and peaceful world that would be destroyed by the actions of the acidic coloured dynamite that could also represent the human race. However, we found out it is actually an Alphabetic 'Baudot Code' and that the whole album has a hidden political meaning, which shows Coldplay as being an activist band. The Baudot Code works on a graph system with the Alphabet, which links to the album name 'X&Y', which are the two dimensions of a 2D graph. The code on the cover was revealed to mean 'X&Y' and the message inside the booklet was worked out to mean 'Make Trade Fair'. If it is trying to convey an important message that affects many people, it makes little sense to cover it up in code, however it could be used to create a buzz and excite fans, however we thought it was too confusing. The genre of music is Alternative Rock, however the bright colour scheme could link to techno or use of synth. The Target Audience would be for all ages as Coldplay is not controversial and is simple and plain. Tappin Gofton is the Graphics design duo who created this album art and also the Chemical Brothers album cover for 'Push the Button (see above) and 'We are the Night'.