Vinyl albums had fantastic artwork. They often had double covers that folded out.
Sadly, CD’s are tiny and the artwork doesn’t have the same impact. It’s a shame because a lot of very creative people created album artwork.
I’ve been searching for a hi-res site with album covers. No luck so far.
How about naming a few favorite Covers and links?
Here are a few of mine. Sorry for the low res. I’m not having any luck finding decent quality images. The printing on Album Covers doesn’t scan well.
Abby Road
Willy and the Poor Boys
Bayou Country (I’d love to have a scan from the original photo. Scans from the printed cover don’t do it justice)
Apparently record companies do NOT want hi-rez versions of album art readily available on the web, and take action against sites that post them.
Recently I did a Sgt. Peppers pastiche for a holiday card and there were no hi-rez images to be found online. Fortunately I had a book of album art and was able to scan what I needed.
I think there are still plenty of bands and artists out there collaborating on fantastic album art. The only problem is that yeah, the format is unfortunately much smaller (or even non-physical at all with increasing digital distribution). Examples from recent albums I have:
The Mars Volta, Frances the Mute, Deloused in the Comatorium, Octahedron:
Actually, almost all The Mars Volta albums have great art, with multiple panels and foldouts, wraparounds, etc. Many of them by very famous artists (at least in terms of album art) – the first two TMV covers linked here are actually by Storm Thorgerson, who among others did a lot of the Pink Floyd album covers (including Dark Side of the Moon).
Tool has some great artwork, not just on the covers, but also inside the package. A notable one - their album 10,000 Days has a nice cover, but also stereoscopic lenses that let you look through the inside artwork and see it in “3-D”.
Mom’s Apple Pie, the only group who were famous for their album cover.
Albums often had fancy covers and souvenirs that CDs don’t bother with. The Who Live at Leeds had a ton of things that came with the disk (the CD version duplicates them, to an extent, but there’s no full-sized poster or a copy of the Who’s contract for Woodstock, for instance.
I’m really partial to Hypngnosis covers. Two of my favorites are Flash in the Pan and their second album Lights in the Night. If you look closely at the second album, you’ll see the artwork for the first album peeking through the “scratch” on the cover (it’s a bit easier to see on the cover instead of pictures of it). It was also noticeable under the black ink if you looked closely.
Depeche Mode’s “A Broken Frame” had a photo (taken specifically for the cover) that ended up winning some award or something like that. It’s a great picture.
I find it interesting that the thing that really rekindled my interest in album art was my iPhone, because it slaps the album art up as wallpaper while the song is playing. As a result I’ve seen some new stuff I like:
I like the cover forE. Costello’s Imperial Bedroom, but just for the illustration… the typography is pretty meh.
Cheap Thrills, already mentioned by Labdad is a lot of fun.
And Houses of the Holy.
My favorite covers are the Reid Miles designed Blue Note jazz albums, but that’s true for pretty much every graphic designer in the western world. Low budget art that defined cool.
Supposedly the designer liked classical, didn’t really care for jazz, rarely listened to the records, and would trade off his samples for other albums.
My all time favourite is Frank Zappa’s Weasels Ripped My Flesh, as illustrated by Neon Parks.
Runner up, cover to This Leaden Pallby Half Man Half Biscuit. I can’t find a decent image of it for love nor money for the reasons outlined earlier. Shame. It means the little bit of cheer in the midst of that rather grim yet evocative image is lost, that of the bicycle tire that someone has managed to throw over the lamp post, hoopla style.
More pretty links there, and I agree about better graphic links these days. iTunes now shows albums covers in a variety of ways when you play or search for a song.
It’s a good thing.
That’s one of my favorites. And here’s a slightly larger Leaden Pall image.
I’m with cjepsom on this. I also have this suspicion that the decline of marijuana with seeds was in part caused by the inability to clean one’s dope on a CD cover.
