I came across two great sleeve designs this morning.

Siggi Eggertsson illustrates The Odd Couple by Gnarls Barkley (imagine the interactive work you could create with this).



Keane's Under the Iron Sea by Big Active.

My colleague Neato's brother came up with this fun and often hilarious way to come up with your imaginary band's first album. Follow the steps below and you can go from zero to debut–album–hero in under five minutes.

First visit this random Wikipedia page and take the entry title for your band name.

Now go to this random quote generator, and take the last four words of the last quote for your
album title (you may need to generate a new list from the button at the
bottom).

Finally go to this random selection from the most interesting pictures of the last seven days on Flickr and take the third image for your album cover.

Here's the “voluminous” debut album from my hot new two–piece:



Enjoy and please feel free to post links to your creations in the comments!

Having recently lamented the death of the record sleeve, I'm was intrigued to stumble across Seven Inch Project this evening. It's a record label that releases music on very limited runs of seven inch vinyl, with gate–fold sleeves and artist designed artwork. When you purchase the record you also get access to a high quality mp3 download so you can easily play the music on your digital devices too. While it's always going to be a niche market and you're never going to buy all of your music in this way, It seems like a nice way to own something tangible connected to a particularly favourite artist. Unfortunately, at the moment there's no way to see from the website what you're actually going to get. Some good photography of the packaging would go a long way toward convincing punters to click the magic buy link.

Update: Clarke from Seven Inch Project has been in contact to say the site has now been updated with extra photos of the record sleeves and cover art - great to see them responding to feedback so promptly.

I just finished this e–flyer for my long standing client Sancho Panza. It features some neat user–generated Flash trickery. Check it out here.

Muxicall is a collaborative music making tool created by Diana Antunes, a student on the New Technologies of Communication degree at the University of Aveiro in Portugal. It's based around the idea of up to 8 people improvising at once. Although there's no particularly ground-breaking technology here and the actual music making interface could be easier to use, it's a great idea and it's beautifully crafted too. The addition of a splash of colour (based on an Issac Newton theory apparently) for each musical note, means that when a few people are playing at once, the experience is quite mesmerising. Enjoy!

I'm a lifelong music fan. I've been obsessed by both music itself and the design of music packaging since my dad first took me to the record shop when I was four years old. Whenever I got a new record, tape or CD, the first thing I would do (after putting it on the stereo) was tease the sleeve out of the cover and unfold.



Now I'm grown up and a graphic designer, I still buy music but the packaging is gone. I go to iTunes, find the music I want to buy, and hit the magic button. I get the audio files and a cover image, but the magic of the sleeve has gone. No more are the mysterious fold-out photographic spreads, cryptic illustrations and intriguing liner notes (who is Frankie the Horse?).

So the question is: when digital music becomes the norm, what will happen to the record cover?

A couple of years ago I put this question to Tony Wilson at a Q&A session. Music fans and graphic geeks alike will know that Tony commissioned some of the finest record sleeves ever created. With Wilson's Factory Records as client, Peter Saville produced a slew of brilliant designs for New Order and Joy Division. His response was that it was no longer relevant. This disappointed me at the time. I was annoyed by the way he so quickly dismissed the works of art which had been so important to me and other young designers. Now I can see his point.

Vinyl records were fragile so they needed packaging to protect them. The packaging employed for products of all kinds, from tobacco to toilet roll, have long been embellished in order to help them stand out from their competitors on the shelves. This naturally happened to the packaging used for records, and later for cassettes and CDs. Ever since the 1960s when rock and pop music exploded into youth culture, serious music fans could be pretty sure that their favourite band's new album would come in a pretty sweet package.

Digital music doesn't need to be protected from scratches or dust, and it doesn't compete for your attention on a shelf with a hundred other releases, so it doesn't need a package. Sure, iTunes and programs like it make an effort to show you a jpeg of the physical album cover, but this is a really just a stop-gap solution. With the mainstream adoption of digital music the album cover as we know it will cease to exist.

If you believe this, and you're anything like me you'll already be showing signs of stress and discomfort; but there's no need to retire to the shed with your precious gate-fold Led Zeppelin LPs just yet. Just because the record cover's days are numbered doesn't mean that graphic design for music is dead. In the new world of digital music, standing out from their peers is more important to musicians than ever. Having better design and art direction for their websites / widgets / blogs / adverts etc. will help labels, bands and artists do just that.