Your PACT charts are where you’ll start doing marketing research. You’ll need three PACT charts, one for each design you’ll create, but they will probably share some aspects.

Use a website that sells music (for example, iTunes, Amazon, or CD Baby) to find examples from the genre you picked. You could also look at music label websites or your own music library.

As you look at other album covers in the genre, make notes about similarities you see. Fans of genres generally like consistency. As with other types of genres, people process what they see and hear based on expectations they have from other texts in the same genre. As with much work within a genre, the designer needs to navigate a solution that is interesting and innovative while still responding to the elements of that genre.

Like all rules, the one about consistency can be broken if you’re very careful. The album art of Nine Inch Nails’ Hesitation Marks uses a very subdued type and a warm color palette, two features that seem at odds with the stereotypically stark, dark imagery one might associate with an industrial-rock band. But the artwork continues a consistent theme used in the visual identity of the group, a low-key detachment from which convulsive sounds periodically emerge. In this case, departing from genre has been a smart design strategy.