Assignment 1: Taxonomy

[Madeline Zara Reader]

OBJECT

I have continued on with my original idea of album covers, although I have refined it a great deal. After the presentation critiques I decided to limit my albums to include only Australian ones, all of which had sales recorded above 35,000 units (Gold) (Arla website). The reason behind this was so I could accurately visualize how the colours used in album cover design relate to genre and sales figures.

Other insights I was interested in gaining included the effect of the itunes era; has the fact that many album covers are only being seen in digital format, in smaller dimensions, had any effect on the boldness of colours being used on album covers? Or do certain genres of music tend to use similar colours?

INSPIRATION

I first found inspiration in ‘The colour of top grossing movies’ example Andrew showed us. It opened my eyes to the possibilities of using colours as they are and not converting them into numeric data.



This led to me thinking about other visual ways I could do something similar and I stumbled across an artist called Jason Salavon. He does something similar, in that he uses data from media sources (films, tv, magazine etc) and creates artworks using this information. Salavon’s work is much more beautiful and creative that the movie poster example; it was his influence that made me think harder and more creatively.



CHARACTERISTICS

Album number:

This refers to whether this particular album is the band’s debut or whether they have released other albums previously. From this I was hoping to gather insight into any differences in cover design there may be depending on whether the band is just starting there career or not. I gathered this data from wikipedia.

Year released:

What year the album was released. This was an important characteristic to see the changing colour trends and also if albums released after the itunes store (2003) were affected.
I gathered this data from wikipedia and amazon.


Sales accreditiation:

All of the albums I chose received an accreditation rating above gold (35,000 units), the reason behind this was because I couldn’t find any sales figures below that, especially for Australian bands. I gathered this information from the Aria website.

Genre:

The genre of the album. This was interesting to relate to the colours used in the cover designs and to see if the style of music is reflected through this. I gathered this information from wikipedia, amazon and itunes.

Colour:

I decided to use the same technique as was used in the movie poster example to gather my colour information. This meant I chose the most prominent colour, then two major colours, followed my two minor colours on the album cover. I then arranged these like so:



IMAGES

Click the image below to see my full set on Flickr.














VISUALISATION 1



This is the required Treemap visualisation. It arranges all of the albums into a hierarchy, placing them into genre categories, colouring them in relation to the album number, and sizing them in relation to sales. The only insight this visualisation provided me with was that many albums that did quite well sales-wise already had at least one album out beforehand. Thus, the more well-known bands had good sales.


VISUALISATION 2



In this simple visualisation I decided to arrange the colours in a column and in their genre categories to try and find a preliminary look into what I might discover later in further explorations. The inspiration for this came from the movie poster example. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that there did seem to be a correlation between genre and cover colour. Many dark colours seemed to be the prominent colour, whilst there were quite a few orange and beige tones also used.


VISUALISATION 3



Using illustrator I then decided to arrange the tabs of colour, each representing an album colour into a kind of matrix chart. I used 'year released' on the Y-axis and 'genre' on the X-axis. I also included a red line at 2003 to mark when the itunes store was introduced and albums started being bought off the internet in a greater way.

Analysing this graph it looks as though the colour trends of today have headed more towards the browns, grays and beiges, rather than brighter colours such as red and bright blues. This gave me some clue into the insight that perhaps the itunes age has not affected the colours used on album covers.


VISUALISATION 4



I used a Bubble chart in Many Eyes and then edited it in Photoshop to create this visualisation. I used the colour data I had gathered and arrange them into circles, each representing an album. The colours on the outer edge are the more prominent ones featured on each cover. The size of each circle is in proportion to the number of sales. The insight I gathered from this analysis was that many of the album covers that generated the most sales are darker in colour. It may be that they are more striking and attractive, as they seem to feature a number of dark colours and only one or two brighter colours, not overdoing it, keeping the colour scheme simple yet effective.


VISUALISATION 5



I very particularly liked the way this visualisation turned out. Using the same colour data I arrange them into circles in each genre. Placing the more prominent colours on the outside and with a greater stroke weight. The size of the circles have no real relevance, it only relates to the number of albums from that particular genre I collected in my data set. What I found interesting is the correlation between each genre and the colours used; there are some definite patterns. The alternative music genre features warm earthy colours; while the rock and alternative rock are quite similar, except for the large chunk of blue featured in the rock colours. The pop albums are interesting in the fact that they have quite neutral colours, but feature quite heavy contrast, still communicating the mood of the music. The acoustic albums I collected are very mellow in their colour choices, once again reflecting the music.

FINAL TAXONOMY



For my final taxonomy I wanted to create something that was creative, attractive, whilst still providing insight into the relationship between album covers and sales records. This taxonomy is in the visual form of a plant, forever growing and changing, as is the music industry. I was still interesting in exploring further the impact that the itunes store had on album cover designs in Australia, so I focused the visualisation on that one point (2003). Each album is represented as a circle with its cover colours. The position of each album is determined by its sales, where the higher up the plant, the more it sold, and also the bigger it grows. I decided to only include the relevant data in this taxonomy, I didn’t want to clutter up the visualisation with axis and numbers. I feel that all the viewer needs to know is that sales increases as the plant gets higher and the albums on the left were released before the itunes store was introduced and the albums on the right were released after.

The insight that I gained from my analysis of this taxonomy was that I don’t think it is a matter of itunes heavily influencing the change in cover design and colour. I feel it is a matter of changing trends and what is considered attractive and appealing to viewers, whether they be in a cd store or browsing online. Many of the early albums feature colours that clash quite horribly, using lots of orange and blues. Maybe this was because in a cd store a customer is faced with thousands of covers staring back at them and album designers in that day knew that they needed to grab the customer’s attention, so they created covers that were quite garish. Whereas these days, itunes filters out what the customer is interested in, so they do not need to search in the same way as they would entering a physical store. So maybe itunes has effected the colours used, just not in the original way I thought it would.

Of course there are many other more important factors that effect the reasons behind an albums success, mainly the music, but I was interested in seeing the effect colours have on attracting people to look at an album, and I believe that colour does play an important part in the way people judge an album on first glance.


LINKS
- Jason Salavon
- Aria website
- Movie poster inspiration
- Sleevage- Album cover design
- Amazon

Other Del.icio.us links

[Martin]

Really good blog post - from an aesthetic perspective and also regarding the technical implementation (it's one of the few blog posts that actually feature all the links that were required). I also particularly like visualisation 5. It would have been interesting to see the size being mapped to something else than the number of instances you had from the respective genre. Or they could actually all be the same size, which would still be a very appealing image.