Monday 21 Aug 2006
Many creatives cite record covers as the things that first switched them onto design, and the fascination with this canvas can endure the length of a career. Digit investigated the industry, and the threat MP3 poses to CD art.
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Long considered one of the most innovative areas of graphic design, record-sleeve art has a history of introducing complex imagery to the mass market.
Popular music, as a form of youth culture, is intimately entwined with visual culture. From the psychedelic era of the 60s through the DIY ethos of punk, the gloss of disco, and the urban bling of hip-hop, the image has been almost as vital a cultural expression as the music – and in a few cases, more so.
Record sleeves have never been just packaging, they’re objects that express the desires of the audience in a fundamental way. Graphic design is an ever-changing medium, but right now design for the music industry is undergoing change of an almost epochal nature.
At the core of this is the MP3 revolution. While CD sales still outstrip music downloads by a significant margin, the growth of iTunes and file-sharing sites cannot be ignored.
“I’m personally a vinyl person,” says Ed Templeton, creative director of Red Design. The company has created artwork for an array of musicians including David Gray, McFly, and Fatboy Slim.
“When I got around to doing this professionally, it was mainly CDs.” Despite the never-ending cycle of change, Templeton is optimistic about the future.
“Having seen formats come and go, I think it’ll be a long time before there is no physical product. We recently did a Fatboy Slim campaign for CD, DVD, vinyl, download, and UMD.”
However, the change from CD to digital download is surely even more profound than the switch from LP to CD. CDs represented a cut in canvas size, with the generous 12-inch sleeve replaced by a mere 12cm, but designers quickly took to making what was once a simple sleeve into complex and detailed booklets.
With downloads, the artwork is often gone entirely. In fact, we may be seeing the beginning of a generation gap – today’s teenagers are growing up accustomed to screen-savers, desktop wallpaper and, of course, videos as the primary modes of visual expression associated with music, rather than sleeve art.
Download festival
But Templeton believes people like to collect. “The public who are buying downloads are kids who’ve never owned a record or a CD,” he says.
These comments are echoed by Kevin Foakes (AKA Strictly Kev), art director at acclaimed indie label Ninja Tune.
“It’s a shame but the CD was the death of the record cover, certainly of packaging,” he says.
Foakes thinks that downloads are potentially even worse for images: “MP3 players are so small – I don’t know anyone who’d want to look at a design on such a small screen.
“The people buying the CDs are the collectors. The packaging and design that relates to the music is one reason why they’re buying the CD,” he says.
Paul West, co-founder of Form, who has worked on music by Depeche Mode, Rachel Stevens, Girls Aloud, Everything but the Girl and Scritti Polliti, sounds a more upbeat note:
“Even with MP3s, bands will need an identity, probably more than ever. I like to think the sleeve is a way of getting people to buy the CD instead of downloading it for £7.99.”
From the 1950s onward, music was the dominant, often the sole, form of youth culture. As youth culture morphed into popular culture, music became even more important, but today music competes in a much more crowded cultural marketplace where video games, the Internet, and movies are as significant as pop once was.
This has impacted upon young designers’ career choices: “The level of interest from graduates and students has reduced slightly. The new generations are less motivated by music,” says West.
State of independence
However, record companies still pay plenty of attention to getting the sleeve right. The record company that represents the band can be a big influence on how the sleeve will look.
Working with a major artist on a major label can be a different experience to working with an unknown band on an indie label, though.
Despite EMI’s acquisition of Mute Records in 2002, the label continues to plough its own left-field furrow, releasing music by the likes of Slovenian art rockers Laibach, and German industrial pioneers Einstürzende Neubauten – artists that have a loyal fan-base, but for whom widespread commercial success is not even a possibility.
As a result, the label’s finances are likely to be heavily dependent on the acts in its roster who have become superstars such as Moby, Goldfrapp, Erasure, Nick Cave, and Depeche Mode.
Despite this, Mute records has a history of innovative design and packaging. Paul West rues this difference: “A lot of majors don’t seem to have time for artist development,” he says.
“The pressure to be immediately successful has been intensified.” This pressure is reflected in the packaging, which is often safer and less innovative, says West.
Paint it black?
CDs also have stringent requirements – shops won’t stock items that don’t fit into the standard sized racks, but that doesn’t mean creativity is destroyed altogether.
Key to this is the growth of limited-edition special releases – short runs of a few thousand copies that aren’t supplied in the typical jewel case.
Books, fold-out posters, and even metal tins have been found troubling the staff at record stores, bringing a variety of interesting materials into the design process.
“With labels like Warp and Mute, the art is so important that people will always buy the CD. Throughout college, I was a massive fan of [record label] 4AD,” he says.
However, West does not feel that the most creative work necessarily emerges from the indie scene. Form has worked on several mainstream pop acts, including Rachel Stevens and Girls Aloud.
“With Girls Aloud we did it on a single-by-single basis, because they change their look on an almost daily basis. A typical campaign is generally four singles and an album, but the girls in January would not be the girls in May,” he says.
“It’s easy for designers to treat pop as ‘chocolate box’. We try to bring a little bit more sophistication to the work.”
One major difference is that when designing for indies, the designer will typically meet the artist and talk to them. With the majors, they might not even hear the music.
Ed Templeton worked on David Gray’s album Life in Slow Motion for Atlantic Records, but during the design process he did not meet the artist. “It was all done through assistants,” he says.
As Kevin Foakes is the art director at Ninja Tune he himself designs most of the label’s sleeves and oversees all of them, but this also means working on compilations, which can be especially difficult in light of the conflicting desires of the parties involved.
“With compilation work, I don’t pander to any artist at all,” says Foakes. “It’s about trying to create some kind of identity and promoting the label image.
“Vaughan Oliver did the same for 4AD – the artists have to toe the line with the aesthetic.”
Indeed, the idea of labels having strong individual and coherent identities stretches back in history to the likes of the acclaimed jazz label Blue Note, where all sleeves were designed in-house – and the artists concentrated on making music, leaving design to the designers.
Sleeve design is a rewarding business, and not just for designers. Of course, designers get their work into tens of thousands of eager hands, sometimes millions, but the fans may get even more from the process: “Look at U2’s Achtung Baby,” says Paul West.
“They took an ironic leap and that was reflected in the design. People started reading symbolism into the photographs and iconography.”
Red’s Ed Templeton agrees: “We did Fatboy Slim stuff that sold eight million copies,” he says. “I realized that eight million people have a Red design in their house.”
You never give me your money
It’s not all glamour and rewards, though. Budgets can be tight – fees have been slashed in recent years – as can the timeframe for delivering work: “You do all of this work, win a pitch and then they say ‘well done, now we have 10p for the campaign’,” says Paul West.
Indie labels are run on tight finances and even majors are concerned about expenditure, especially in today’s ultra-competitive marketplace.
As a result, free pitching has become the norm. “There is a scourge of pitching in the industry. Labels have developed a philosophy of not paying for pitches. It’s really bad – it devalues graphic design.
“Labels wouldn’t ask this of a photographer or illustrator. In some senses, design has become the arse-end of the creative process,” says West.
Pitching is a problem across the creative industry as a whole, but despite the rising influence of computer games, the Internet and downloads, for now the music CD hanging on.
And as long as musicians continue to inspire, creative people will be drawn to creating the images that complement the sounds.
Case study
Goldfrapp: Supernature
Art direction: Alison Goldfrapp, Mat Maitland and Gerard Saint
Design: Mat Maitland
Designing for a band that already has a strong visual identity could be viewed as either a blessing or a curse. On the one hand, at least the musicians will be interested in – and appreciative of – the process. On the other hand, everyone knows what they say about too many cooks...
Alison Goldfrapp is herself a visually-aware individual. Having studied fine art at college, Goldfrapp exhibited as a performance artist before joining forces with Will Gregory to form the electro duo.
“Somebody like Alison [Goldfrapp] tends to come to a project with ideas that have already informed the songs,” says Gerard Saint, who co-art directed the album with Goldfrapp and Big Active designer Mat Maitland.
Big Active’s relationship with the band dates back to its second album, Black Cherry. The band’s first album, Felt Mountain, was critically well-received, but it was the followup that really got the band noticed.
With Black Cherry, Goldfrapp’s sound mutated into sleazy electro, and Big Active’s work on the sleeve perfectly encapsulated this new direction.
Supernature, the band’s third record occupied similar murky sexual territory but applied a shiny pop gloss – and so did the artwork.
“On the recent album, Goldfrapp had a 70s diva-esque style in mind,” says Saint. “The actual project took about four months in total, from sitting down with Alison to discuss ideas through to the completion of the album and campaign.
“We look at the whole campaign, the marketing and promotion. It’s important these days as there are so many things in the marketplace,” he says, noting that music faces greater commercial and cultural challenges than ever before.
“The CD has proven itself to be the enemy within. I can foresee a time in the future where vinyl will prove relevant due to the packaging.
Fans are still going to gigs and buying merchandise. Perhaps the downloads will simple be the cheaper option where you don’t get the added value of the packaging,” he says. www.bigactive.com
Undercover: Classics from recent years
The Flaming Lips: At War with the Mystics(Warner Bros., 2006)
Sixties psychedelic typography may be an unusual choice for a band that emerged from the fertile breeding ground of post-punk, but it’s impossible to predict what the Flaming Lips will do next – musically and visually.
Pollock-esque splattering is mixed with figurative paintings by singer Wayne Coyne to create the image of an explosion for the front cover of the band’s 2006 anti-war protest paean.
The paint-spec motif is carried on throughout the internal leaves, here set on a fabric background – blood on a uniform perhaps?
A similar motif was used on Pink Floyd’s 1983 attack on the Falkland’s war, The Final Cut.
Radiohead: Amnesiac (Parlophone, 2001)
Designed by Stanley Donwood (a pseudonym for writer, artist, and long-time Radiohead collaborator Dan Rickwood), this album was initially packaged in a beautiful limited-edition hardback book.
Internally, the sleeve takes on the look of a library book, complete with borrowing card, and is filled with abstract digitally manipulated photographs and scratchy line drawings.
Donwood’s work is as notable for his innovative approach to packaging as the design itself. The initial album sleeve for Radiohead’s previous CD, Kid A, also saw innovative packaging.
Limited to the US market only, it first appeared in the style of a limited-edition boardbook. The band’s most recent album, Hail to the Thief, was dressed in a soft-bound card cover that folded out to make a large art print.
Thom Yorke: The Eraser (XL Recordings, 2006)
The Eraser is a new solo album by Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, and Stanley Donwood took on the design for this project too. For The Eraser, Donwood has created a hand-draw vision of an apocalyptic London, looking very much like a woodcut print.
Inspired by lo-fi design and pre-photosetting illustration printing, Donwood’s bleak illustrations chime perfectly with Yorke’s gloomy vision.
Accompanied by a Flash Web site, perhaps Donwood’s use of animation reflects a new graphic direction in an increasingly Internet-obsessed world.
David Thomas and Two Pale Boys: Surf’s Up! (Glitterhouse, 2001)
This simple two-leaf sleeve for David Thomas captures something of the essential alien nature of the American vernacular.
Designed by John Thompson, a long-time visual collaborator with Thomas’ main band, ‘avant garage’ heroes Pere Ubu, the cover shows a middle-aged maternal figure proudly looking outside the frame.
Opening out the sleeve reveals her two redneck sons firing guns at an unseen target. Perfect for a musician obsessed with the geography of plains and the weirder by-ways of American popular culture.
Jason Walsh
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Do you share your creations online?