Researching the use of Homage in industry

 

Pet Shop boys with their 'Actually' album was a remastered version of Field Music- Actually, nearly and was designed by multi-award winning Farrow Design; an organisation specialising in design, branding and art direction after having worked with various clients in various industries such as retail and art galleries.
This is one example of a homage, and despite the Pet Shop Boys creating music within a different genre (electro-pop) to Parables (indie rock) the idea to replicate conventions from one cd cover onto another after original success has been proven to be effective as the outcome appears stylish and classic, exciting the audience and showing the designer skill in terms of high levels of detail. Conventions from Field Music's original were copied directly, such as fonts, alignments, colour scheme, content of image, placement of image, etc. I feel this works well. After finding this, I decided to explore the use of homage featuring as front cover images further.

Clinic's Internal Wrangler album includes tracks of the indie rock genre. The cover was inspired by Ornette Coleman's 'Ornette' album created 40 years prior. The resemblance is clearly noticeable, using conventions including font type, size and style, interestingly distorted shaping surrounding the album title and the use of and blue and yellow colour scheme. I feel this is effective and appears retro and stylish. There is little difference in album covers although they are clearly not exactly the same. Modifications made include the album title/ band name, differing shades from original colour scheme and different distortions of shapes in different places. I feel it is acceptable and a likeable idea to homage previous album covers as elements of vintage styling emphasise the nature of the indie rock genre in an attractive and modern way.