Week 7 Ryan McDonnell

I decided to use album covers for my two examples of use of color. Usually I don't go too deep into the music genre (as you've noticed in the past I've done quite a bit of sports stuff), but I think two albums by two of my favorite bands capture bold and subtle color quite well.

Starting off with bold color, the cover art for Muse's album "The Resistance" uses a full array of colors that really touches upon a wide variety of paletts. The mixture of both bright and dull colors gives a striking visual effect to the cover. It's also worth pointing out that the colors become brighter as the hexagonal figures move towards the center of the image. The use of the orange and yellow walkway also brightens up the navy background and makes it "pop" in the image. I can only imagine what the cost was to print out covers of this (thank goodness for the age of iTunes and online music stores) considering it's really using the majority of the color palettes found in software such as the Adobe Suite. The artwork also is representative of Muse's music itself, as they use quite a wide variety of musical styles in their work, so it is pretty fitting to have such a wide variety of color as well.

On the other end of the spectrum, we see a subtle use of color in the album art for the Dropkick Murphys' album "The Meanest of Times". The artwork is all done in black, white, and grey and the picture is in greyscale itself, too. It gives off that old-timey feel, especially with the gothic font used as well, and gives it a distinctive feel. If you don't know the Dropkick Murphys then you should know they're a punk band heavily influenced by Irish music. It does seem to have that punk-ish feel to it as well, though you don't really get the message of their Irish-American roots unless you get the special edition album, which happens to be a green color. All in all though, the monochromatic look to this album cover really give it a blast from the past and makes it appear to have a timeless feel to it. The album itself is pretty awesome, too, come to think about it, but I digress.

So there you have it, two album covers that capture the differences of subtle and bold color, and quite effectively at that.