Design Album Covers through the “CD Cover Meme”

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Still looking for programming ideas for Teen Tech Week? Have teens try their hand at the “CD cover meme,” which has been working its way through the web over the last week:

  1. Go to the Wikipedia Random Articles page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random). The title of the article is the name of your band.

  2. Next, check out the random list on the online Quotations Page Quotations page (http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3). The last four words of the very last quotation is the title of your album.

  3. Finally, visit Flickr’s “Interesting Photos From The Last 7 Days” page (http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/). The third image will be your cover art.

Teens can then use Photoshop, open source solutions such as Gimp, or free web apps such as Picnik or Fauxto to put it all together (my results are to the right). This is a great chance for teens to remix a few different corners of the web into inspiration to make music of their own.

Posted in: Music ⋅ Tagged: ,

About Joseph Wilk

I'm a teen library assistant with the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh's Main location. Here, I'm the graphic novel and music librarian in addition to running anime, music, LGBTQ, incarcerated youth, and video programming. I'm happy to serve YALSA as a blogger, member of the Teen Tech Week committee, and as chair of the Music Interest Group. Otherwise, you can find me in da club.

5 Thoughts on “Design Album Covers through the “CD Cover Meme””

  1. Morgan [Visitor] on February 18, 2008 at 12:22 pm said:

    I love it! How cool. I hope to post this to our teen blog for teen tech week at http://www.kdl.org/teens

  2. Emily [Visitor] on February 19, 2008 at 8:52 am said:

    It would be better to require that students find a CC licensed photo on flickr – there are plenty on there, encouraging them to use copyright images is not really a great idea.

    I like the randomness of every fourth, third, etc., but there are other issues involved in media production that you could work in by requiring creative commons images.

  3. joseph wilk [Member] on February 19, 2008 at 10:31 am said:

    You’re right. While the program itself is arguably fair use, copyright should definitely factor into the discussion. Teens might want to actually use this sort of process to build cover art as something more than an education exercise. In that case, they would be better off browsing Flickr’s Creative Commons-licensed photos:

    http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/

    Thanks for keeping me intellectually honest!

  4. Emily [Visitor] on March 3, 2008 at 11:26 am said:

    I think this is actually one of the most important factors to include FOR the educational value, since you’re encouraging them to be content creators and they need to see these resources as peer resources with other content creators.

    I post almost all of the photos on my flickr page (link above) as CC images because I like the idea of letting other people play with them. I take them for fun, not profit. Seeing the benefits of working “with” other artists this way could make the project even more engaging, since it can encourage them to make direct contacts with other people there. 🙂

  5. Kate: Your Friendly Neighborhood Otaku on January 9, 2009 at 2:45 pm said:

    Oh my god. I got “Ganzeltopf” as my random page.
    And my phrase is “The Present, Only Longer.”

    Heh.

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