jose g's List: Album Cover Design

This site is the personal collection of its author. He presents to us the art of many different albums as well as short blurbs about the album's packaging, and the music itself. It's pretty amazing to see how album design has changed over the years

This site is an enormous database of album covers spanning many different genres and decades. There are over 180,000 pages of content! There's even a rating system to up-vote the highest quality images. The front page has an ever changing grid of random album covers. You could sit back and watch until inspiration finds you. The site's front page also provides access to their blog and forums.

Originally, this was going to be placed under the blog section, but I feel it deserves a spot at the top. The folks who run this site really do jump in and dissect the whole package, giving their perspective as well as real facts behind the music and art. Some articles will even show alternate and banned covers for certain albums. There are also top ten lists that focus on themes present in many covers.

This article gives the reader a step-by-step guide to creating their own album artwork. The grand majority is covered here; everything from picking the right software to use, where to locate digital templates, acquiring photos and fonts, and of course, copyright and FBI warnings. The article was written by a record company owner who also works as a graphic designer.

The article above gave us the basics on turning our ideas into reality. Now it's time to take it one step further: making a career out of it. This article let's us know how to go about finding, and what to expect from this particular field. It's important to know that one may have to do several free jobs before bringing in any sort of income. This will serve as getting ones' "foot in the door."

This is the forum for Album Art Exchange. The front page is divided into three sections: General Discussion, Tech Talk, and White Noise (an off topic board.) The participants are fairly varied and include most everyone from professionals to enthusiasts. There are over 12,000 members on this board with the most recent posting being from yesterday. The environment is friendly and I feel is probably the best forum on this topic. Signing up for the forum is much like any other, and will only take a few minutes.

Originally I was going to use Sleevage in this section, but felt it deserved a spot in the top 3. Instead, I'm using Sleeveface. This blog is a collection of pictures described by the site's operator as, "one or more persons obscuring or augmenting any part of their body or bodies with record sleeve(s) causing an illusion." The site itself is more fun and creative than informative, but I feel deserves a mention. It's run by a man named Carl Morris who is credited with coining the term "sleeveface." Information on Morris himself was scarce, as his personal blog is in another language and would not translate in Google Translate. Some great entires on this blog include: "Elton John FC," "The Joker," and "Heart."

Gimp is essentially a freeware version of Photoshop with some differences. You could use it much the same way to create original art or alter existing images/photographs. The latest version of the program (2.7.3) was released in late August and is compatible with both Windows and Mac formats. The software has been downloaded over two million times with praise from critics and users alike. It currently ranks #9 on download.com's top Image Editing Software list.

After receiving some fairly lackluster results with the other recommended search engines, I decided to go with Google. Google is a search engine that needs no introduction due to its popularity and size. It has many specific features that allows users to use "advanced searches," as well as image and map searches. Some of the search syntax I used for this project were: "album cover," design, "record cover," and art.

In this video, a radio personality sits down with vinyl record historian Gary J. Freiberg to discuss album artwork from 1949 to 1967. Freiberg gives a great history lesson on the evolution of the art. We learn that early vinyl records had very minimal color, let alone actual artwork. As years went by, album covers began to have more life with the inclusion of color and eventually photographs of the artists. It's interesting to note that valuable and collectable albums are still worth half of the asking price for the sleeve itself.

According to musicradar.com, these are the 50 greatest album covers of all time. Each album included in the list has a paragraph or more detailing the reasons that make these album covers so great. In addition to that, some history is included with each entry. The list spans many different genres and decades that most music and art lovers alike can appreciate.