Create album art for MP3 and CD formats

How-to
By published

Anna Wray reveals the secrets of designing versatile album art.

In this tutorial I'll explain how you can use InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop to create album art that works as a CD cover and scaled down to accompany an MP3 purchased from an online music store such as iTunes. I'll do this by walking you through my cover for Balls, the third album from British group The Broken Family Band.

The design was something of a challenge: on the one hand it had to be bold and clear so it would stand out when made small, but on the other it couldn't be so simple that it didn't work at a larger scale as CD artwork.

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