Research project overview

As a graphic design student with a deep interest in music I thought I would come up with a research project that combines the two. I decided to look into peoples perceptions when it come to looking at different music genres and how this can affect things such as album artwork and promotional material such as flyers and posters. For example what is it about a punk album cover that distinguishes it as a punk genre album, and what design features would be present on a poster advertising a rock music event that would make people instantly recognise it as a rock music event.

How would I do this? what type of research would I use?

Obviously there will be both Secondary and Primary research however I think that I can only collect Qualitative data when conducting my own research as I'm looking into peoples ideas and perceptions when it comes to looking at artwork. Data that can be measured by statistics would not be appropriate here.



For my secondary research I began studying album sleeves that are already out there and drawing up comparisons between them in order to see what goes into specific genre artistic styles. This will help me to better understand how I should work to create my own versions of some album sleeves and music posters.
I will also briefly look into how other designers would design such things in order to gain a better perspective into how people in this kind of industry work.

For my primary research I will come up with a method of gaining an insight into peoples mind about what they think about when they see things about each genre of music. for example I would ask "what is the first thing that comes to mind when you thing about Reggae music"

I will also test some of the designs I make on people to see if they live up to or contradict my research. for example I will show an album cover design I make to a focus group and ask them what they think the genre of the album is.


Designing experiments to test my product for this project is proving difficult however at the same time this is what is proving very interesting. I feel this project will also help me some up with better design solutions when working on products of this area in the future.