[ Album Covers - In Depth ]

I will take some time to analyse the following album cover in detail:































[ Jamiroquai - A Funk Odyssey ]


The album cover for A Funk Odyssey stood at the peak of success commercially for the band in 2001, and the album cover supports this changing of tone for the funk/disco/electronica album.

Imagery
The main image for both the front and the back is the lead, JK, in one of his trademark eccentric dance poses, infront of a laser cannon, which grabs the attention of the audience immediately. The cover uses predominantly straight lines, apart from JK who is rounded and stands out. The colours are restrained to blue/turquoise tones contrasting to heavily saturated whites and blacks. The layout is standard for an album cover, with the main feature in the middle, often the background carrying onto the back cover too. It seems as if JK is "sheltering" the typography from the lasers. The Sony association recognises this as a mainstream band, who are already very well established, and this plus the wide ranges of music that Jamiroquai encompass in their music aim to attract a large audience.
The band did away with the logo of "Buffalo Man" (the most identifyable logo and signifier of Jamiroquai), who featured in all of the previous album covers quite substantially, and can only be seen on the spine and is confined to inside this booklet, maybe to make a more subtle approach.

Typography
The font used on the cover is white, to stand out and is highly stylised and smooth to contrast with the straight lines of the rest of the cover. The positioning right in the bottom-middle of the cover makes it stand out, but the small font also makes sure that it doesn't detract attention away from the main image.
The text anchors the image since the image is funky, stark and bold, thus is a "Funk Odyssey".

Functions
The different functions of the parts of the cover are evident from this album cover. The front is bold and has lots of contrast so as to catch the audience's eye, whilst the back contains lots of information including track listings and institutional information, and the spine contains the bare basic information, such as the artist and album names whilst having logos of the band and the Sony identification text.