Overview

You’ve managed to land a summer consulting job as a graphic designer. You’re part of a small team at the firm and are getting ready to start your first assignment. Your supervisor explains to your team that a friend of a friend needs some design work. Unfortunately, the potential client doesn’t have a lot of money, so as a favor (but against his better judgment, you can tell) your supervisor agreed that your team would do some initial work for free (“on spec,” as designers say) and pitch some designs to the client. If the client likes what she sees, she’ll hire you.

Your team meets with the client, Renee Swetland, to discuss the project. Renee is trying to secure a startup loan for her new record label. Renee explains that she wants to show the bank an album or iTunes cover for a band on the label — she wants it to look professional and interesting, the sort of thing that will seem marketable.

She doesn’t actually have any bands on the label yet, so she’d like you to create an album cover for a fictional band. For the purposes of the scenario, you can choose whatever genre of music you want. She asks your team to begin by doing some research of what iTunes cover art looks like for other albums in that genre. She doesn’t want you to simply copy all of those aspects, but she says it should look like it belongs in that genre. “Sometimes being strikingly different is a good thing,” she says, “but it’s also dangerous, so if you depart from the genre, you’ll need to make a good case for doing that.”

“Can you come up with three possible designs? You can present them to me and I’ll give you feedback to help you create a single, final version. I’d also really appreciate it if you could show me the results of your research — some key examples of covers you looked at and a list of the key characteristics you think covers in that genre need to have.”

Renee finishes by explaining that the artwork should be designed in a format compatible with the iTunes store — 1,400 x 1,400 pixels in JPG or PNG format.

In addition to the three different cover art options, Renee wants you to create a brief presentation (in PowerPoint, Prezi, or another program) to present to her and a couple of her employees. They’ll decide based on this presentation and the designs whether they’d like to hire you to work on a final cover art design.

Your presentation should include four to six album covers from the genre you picked, a list of the important characteristics of that genre, and your three designs. As you show the three designs during your presentation, be sure you discuss the strengths of each, including how that design meets the characteristics you identified as well as any other design features you think work well.