Funk Digipaks - Album Covers

This funk album cover shows a comically large LED sign late at night. This is similar to a lot of older funk music videos, which often take place late at night, or in dark areas, with comically shaped and sized LED signs. A good example of this is the music video for George Clinton's Atomic Dog. This video takes place in a dark arcade with lots of ridiculous LED lettering and shapes plastered all around the room. The font is also a very typical funk font, as well as the "INC" at the bottom, which is a bubble font. Bubble fonts are very common in funk albums. This album was released in 1971.

The design of this cover is more typical of what people expect from funk: bright colours (colours used for funk art are almost always some shade of yellow, red, pink, and orange) wavy lines, and typical funk outfits with things like star-shaped sunglasses. It also helps that the cover is all cartoon, as funk videos (especially jazz-funk) often include animated elements. By having the artwork entirely hand-drawn, Funkadelic were able to get the band member's onto the album cover, without using real life elements, like photos. George Clinton's Atomic Dog is also an example of animated elements in music videos, as there are animated dogs appearing throughout the entirety of the video. Also the font used for the band name, "Funkadelic", is a bubble font. This album was released in 1981.

This album art is from 2011 but is a throwback to older, classic funk and soul designs. It even has fold creases on it as though it's an old poster or album cover from back in the 70s. The design is similar to the previous two images, as it has a very dark background with red, pink, orange, and yellow lines. These identify it as a funk album. The fonts used for "funk" and "classics" are bubble fonts too, which also fits in with the conventions. The font used for "soul" is also reflective of vintage soul album covers. However, this artwork is very minimalistic, which is a more modern design choice, which indicates that this album is not in fact classic and vintage, but is modern. The album was released in 2011.

Mark Ronson's Uptown Funk has a much more modern design than the others. The lack of colour, aside from the yellow box of names at the top left, is an indication of this change from classic to modern funk album covers. However, the minimalism is still an indication that this is indeed a funk album. It's a lot more minimalist than other ones, like the Ministry of Sound one, but the roundness of the artwork and the polka dots in the middle are easily identifiable as funk conventions. This album was released in 2015.