Artwork
After finishing the music for the album, the band decided that the artwork needed to reflect the themes on the record, likening the change of image to a political campaign. Armstrong recalled: "We wanted to be firing on all cylinders. Everything from the aesthetic to the music to the look. Just everything." Green Day drew inspiration from Chinese communist propaganda art the band saw in art galleries on Melrose Avenue, and recruited artist Chris Bilheimer, who had designed the art for the previous records Nimrod and International Superhits! to create the cover. The band aimed for the cover to be "at once uniform and powerful". After listening to the new music on his computer, Bilheimer took note of the lyric "And she's holding on my heart like a hand grenade" from "She's a Rebel". Influenced by artist Saul Bass's poster for the 1955 drama film The Man with the Golden Arm, Bilheimer created an upstretched arm holding a red heart-shaped grenade. Although he felt that red is the "most overused color in graphic design", he felt that the "immediate" qualities of the color deemed it appropriate for use on the cover, explaining: "I'm sure there's psychological theories of it being the same color of blood and therefore has the powers of life and death...And as a designer I always feel it's kind of a cop-out, so I never used it before. But there was no way you couldn't use it on this cover."
Read more about this topic: American Idiot