Advert Research : Duff McKagan's Loaded - The Taking

Duff McKagan's Loaded - The Taking
The first thing I noticed about this advert design is theme of grey colouring. I only notice two colours other than black, white and grey. There is a tiny purple line around the CD design to the bottom right and the red star in the band's name, this, however, upon checking up on the band, is often there in the name, so I know to ignore this for the particular advert. There are also colours in the icons at the bottom (such as the facebook and twitter icons).

I notice that the album name "The Taking" is written in black marker pen over a line of duct tape. This, along with the hands tied with rope, connotes a feeling of being imprisoned or kidnapped. I assume that this is a feeling that will resonate across the album, being trapped. I notice that the skin is also very pale and the image of the band is also kept in the black and white effect.

The Colour grey is a very neutral colour, and is quite a conservative colour. There are many things it can be used for, some are relevant to this picture, some aren't. Here are a few that are:

• Cold
• Gloom
• Horror Elements

It is very important to use colours that would work well for your genre. This band is a heavy metal band, so they use darker colours. However, a country music band would use much lighter, softer colours such as green, yellow and light blue.

The white lettering over black/dark grey colouring makes it stand out, so you can see it better. If they'd use simple black lettering, it would be near impossible to read with the background. There is no single theme on the lettering of the advert, the name of the album, the name of the band and the information about songs to the right is all used in different fonts.

The use of the hands being tied on front of an advert is quite an entropic look. However, due to the magazine I pulled this from being a Heavy Metal/Rock magazine, it's not nearly as entropic as it usually would be. It's not quite redundant, still odd but it fits in more. However, if a pop musician did this, then it would be very rare and entropic.

There are, as always, the redundant images of the bands record company "Armoury" for this band. And the facebook, twitter and youtube images at the bottom are also redundant. They have only been implemented on adverts, etc, recently, but the 'craze' quickly caught on, and it is no an everyday thing to see.

I like the use of the hands being tied up, and that is an actual photographic image, not something an artist created. I don't have the funds to pay an artist to create/draw band images, so it would be a lot easier if I used a photographic image like this. I also like the image of being tied up on this. I might use this idea, but make it my own, it would have to be different.