How to Prepare Artwork for an Album Cover

Video Transcript

"FREDERICK BURCHELL: Hello. My name is Frederick "Ricky B." Burchell with B4 Entertainment on behalf of Expert Village, and today we're going to talk about producing, manufacturing, marketing, and distributing your independent CD. All right. Now let's talk about photography and artwork. And what you want to do is when you are getting your pictures done for your CD make sure that they are quality. That's the main thing and the name of the game in doing independent music and everything has to be quality. So when you go and find that, looking for photographer to take your pictures, makes sure everything is quality. You don't want to just go on a cheap digital camera because lots of time, yeah, you can a cheap a picture and it'll be good for your CD. But you may want posters and you may want put on a billboard and the better quality the pictures would things get blown up. It looks so much better. So what you want to do is take your time, network with other artists, look at people's photography and say, "Okay, this photography is good." Find out the size that they could blow up the pictures to, so when later down the road and you want to make a big poster and you want to make billboard or whatever you want to do with the pictures that it looks crystal clear. You don't want to look in JPEG and pixel [SOUNDS LIKE] this when you're putting your all works together. And also what you want to do is find professional artwork person, person who does artwork professionally. They are cheap out there--there's plenty of them that are cheap but still look good. You do your networking and look at the artwork, look at other people's work and see if that's a good quality, and compare it to major labels. See if the quality is there. But also you want to do is find somebody who's familiar in your genre of music when they're doing the artwork. Because when you're doing artwork, you don't want to have artwork--if you're doing country CD, you don't want it to look like a rap CD. You want to be familiar with your genre of music. Now, you could be original but when people see the cover, they gotta know what type of music it is off the bat. So that's so important when you're getting your artwork done, that the person who does the artwork understands the genre of the music."