Bob Fenster, a musician from Somerville, NJ, had an album name and a picture he wanted to feature, but for some reason they just didn’t want to work together. That’s where I come in.
This image by Chris Hall is absolutely beautiful! The orange on the inside wall is a perfect complimentary color to the blurry blue structure outside. There’s a nice pop of green in the bushes, and a moody darkness to the foreground. The picture is telling an intriguing story with the broken glass on the windowsill, the rusted metal frame, and the dead tree branch on the inside. If you’re into photography and image composition, you’ll note the usage of the rule of thirds, leading lines, symmetry, framing, depth, and more.
So what’s wrong with it? Why does this not work as an album cover?
The first problem is that it’s a rectangular image, and album art is supposed to be square. In order to make it square (i.e., convert it to a 1:1 ratio), you have to crop something out. But almost everything in the image is essential! If you cut out anything, it loses its feel!
Cropping out the left side removes the color harmony between the blue and orange, loses the rusty look, and makes the tree branch look like an accident. 
Cropping out the right side makes the image feel like it’s missing something, and ruins the balance of the vertical lines.
Before even adding the band name or the album title, we knew that cropping out the image was not an option. It’s not the photographer’s fault, because the photographer wasn’t taking an album cover photo. We just had to adapt the image to make it work.
So where do we go from here? Make it smaller, of course!
When you make a rectangular picture smaller, to fit it into a square image, you end up with blank space above and below. Our natural answer was to add the band name (Bob Fenster & the Windows) and the album name (The Whole in the Pieces) into the blank spaces, but what color should the background be? What font and color should the text be? How do you add important information, without pulling focus from this magnificent, yet haunting picture?
I started with the background. I tried to pull solid colors from the image to make it match, but it just felt so flat. I tried to find complimentary colors, but that made the overall image too noisy (it already has enough colors!). So I decided to try using a grungy texture instead.
I wanted to capture the rusty, broken feel of the image; something that felt like it was as neutral as the surface of a painted wall, yet scratchy from the tree branches or the broken window pieces. Textures like this can be found all over the internet, or you can make your own by just taking close-up pictures of any interesting texture you can find.
Just make sure that you never use something that is copyright protected!
If you’re using the internet to find something, you will either have to pay for the license, use something attributed to creative commons, or find something in the public domain.
Next, I talked extensively with Bob about what kind of font felt right for him. We talked about capital letters vs. lowercase; clean, modern, sans-serif fonts vs. script and handwriting styles. We talked about making something custom vs. finding something that already existed. A lot of these decisions can be adjusted based on budget.
In the end, we decided to find a free font that felt a bit more handwritten. He liked all caps for the band name, and all lowercase for the album title. With that information, I searched for my top favorites and gave him the final say.
For the final pieces (pun intended) of visual interest, we decided on a thin black border around the image, and to anchor the band and album names with the left and right sides of the picture, respectively. When we made the text larger, it took away from the image. Keeping the text small maximizes the white space (or in this case, the grungy gray space), and keeps the viewer focused on Chris Hall’s beautiful picture.
Is it the most profound, and memorable album cover of all time? No. But close your eyes, then open them again. Squint a little bit. Zoom out. What’s the first thing you see? Probably the picture, right? Well, that was the goal all along! Mission accomplished!
The Whole in the Pieces was released on March 15th, 2021, and is available on the Bob Fenster & the Windows Bandcamp page. Make sure to follow Bob and his band on all their social media accounts, and if you’re looking for something simple for your own album cover, you already know what to do.