Non-Narrative Illustration: Final Album Design (Front and Back)

I have finally created my front and back album cover, after several weeks of creating concepts, ideas, trailing, and experimenting.
I really feel that I have developed a contemporary style of design, that compliments the music on the album, as well as suiting Kate's audience.

Front Cover:

I originally thought about adding imagery/typography into the centre of the design, with the eyes around it. This resembled an earlier front cover concept.

After thinking about iconic album designs, I have had the great idea of exuding the name of the album/artist from the front cover, and instead moving them to the rear design cover.

A lot of the most well known iconic designs from albums feature simple designs.
If you look for example at, 'The Dark Side of the Moon', by 'Pink Floyd', you can see how simple album covers can become very iconic.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/3b/Dark_Side_of_the_Moon.png < image reference at this link.

http://rateyourmusic.com/list/fedderedder/rolling_stones_100_greatest_album_covers/

According to the link above, this album design stands at number #35 on Rolling Stone's list of the 100 greatest album covers.
The information I took from the link, was originally taken from an issue of Rolling Stone magazine, published on the 14th of November, 1991.

My design I feel really sets itself apart from other album cover designs, as it is very strange and stimulates the curiosity of potential consumers.
I know for a fact that if I saw this design in a music store, or even on an online shop, I would want to investigate it further.

Rear Cover:

I used my a few elements from my concepts to come up with a rear cover design.
I developed the rear cover after I established what I wanted the theme of the front cover to be, so I could focus on one part at a time.

EMI logo is referenced at this link. > http://musically.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/EMI-logo.gif

It matches the simple black and white visual style of the front cover, whilst carrying on the same type of theme.
On the rear cover, I have combined typography into the illustration. This allows the design to convey necessary information, without cluttering up the contemporary design with too much text.

Both cover sides are aimed at a contemporary audience, this is very important as the criteria of the brief states that the design must appeal to a contemporary market.

For both sides, I used photoshop to tweak the tones of the black.
Originally the black on the designs were washed out, and they appeared quite grey, as the scanner had made the illustrations lighter in tone.
By adjusting the level of blacks in the CYMK settings, I was able to make the blacks much more deeper.
I think this makes the designs much more attractive.

Front and rear together (with bleed):

Placing my cover illustrations onto the template.

I took the template from this website > http://www.rainborecords.com/temp.htm#12l

The template has the dimensions of an industry standard 12" vinyl document.
Because I created my separate covers at a high DPI and size, they could easily be adjusted to fit the template, to which I directly placed them onto.

http://www.rainborecords.com/temp.htm#12l < image reference at this link.

The company who provided the template are professionals in the production of vinyls and CD packaging, so I feel that I can rely on their measurements.

I opened the template in adobe photoshop, and it was to the exact scale of a vinyl template's real size.

I added the completed front and rear illustrations onto the template, and made sure that the images were at the right size, centred and positioned just right.

I then began printing my cover template. I ran into a number of issues, due to the low resolution. My first printed copy was really badly pixelated, and looked awful.
Later I discovered that my template was set at the low DPI of 72.