Great cover for Santogold by Isabelle Lumpkin. I can’t find any info about Isabelle online – if anyone knows who she is please let me know in the comments as I'd be interested in checking out some more of her work.

Matt and Tony are two guys based in New York who've spent the last 30 years collecting vinyl LPs and 45s with funny, quirky and unusual covers. Now they've decided to share their collection with the world at the LP Cover Lover blog.

Here are just some of the many gems they’ve revealed so far:


Soul Snaps drum breaks have been sampled by Ol’ Dirty Bastard and The Prodigy.


Health and safety was a big thing in the fifties


It meant something different in those days apparently...

This, apparently is the world’s first album cover, designed for Columbia by then 23 year old designer Alex Steinweiss. Before this records were sold in generic sleeves. You can read the full story and see lots more images over at Udependent.

Earlier this month many of the music blogs were talking about how mashup master Girl Talk (Gregg Gillis) planned to release his latest album “Feed The Animals” in a Radiohead “pay what you like” style. I checked out the website and immediately thought, “feck the business model – this record’s got a great sleeve!”. I emailed GT’s record label Illegal Art to find out who was responsible, and they kindly put me in touch with Brooklyn, NY based designer Andrew Strasser who agreed to conduct a swift email interview for Sleevelessness.


Slv Great sleeve for Girl Talk’s “Feed The Animals”. What’s the story behind the cover?

A.S. Behind every cover there is a story, haha... There are two parts to Feed The Animals – the title, and the image that we ended up with. I do stage visuals when Girl Talk goes on large tours or plays at big festivals, and all of the equipment was seriously just getting eaten up by all of the comotion on stage. We had large inflatable palm trees and halloween spider archways, all from very suburban on-line inflatable stores. As soon as the inflatables would go up, the chanting impatient crowd would just get a hold of it somehow, and we’d just watch a palm tree get sucked right into the organic mass of Girl Talk fans... never to be seen again. When you go on a 30 day tour, and watch this happen every day, you start feeling like you are going on some kind of an expedition to feed the hungriest of animals (we’re animals too for going along with it).

The cover itself does not relate to “Feed the Animals”. I was doing visuals with Gregg in Las Vegas when he opened for Gnarls Barkley, Kanye West, Lupe Fiasco, and others for this very exciting and very strange Chinese New Year celebration. The crowd was SEATED, and was mostly a hip hop crowd, very mainstream. There was an MC and of course, he’s going to pick on the sorest thumb of the show, which would be Girl Talk... He kicks it off with “so why are you called Girl Talk anyway, what kind of a name is that?”... I think that he was kind of scarred from having to answer that question in front of so many skeptics. The solution was to do a subtle name change from Girl Talk to GT - not an official name change, just a nickname. Gregg originally wanted the GT flames on a brick wall, but I suggested a more ET/Home Alone kind of image, something that references the suburbs more.


Slv Where is the house? Did you take the photo yourself?

A.S. I was in Virginia Beach visiting my family, and I grabbed my moms 6 megapixel snapshot camera and did some long exposures on the house across the street when they had only one light on, and that became the house. Somehow the shot came out perfect.


Slv Did you really set the grass on fire?

A.S. We were really aiming to set a big lawn on fire and actually do it, but the logistics were absolutely bo-bo, so we didn’t do that. I did a micro scale version of the GT on fire with some twigs and lighter fluid, with help from my lovely sister Dana, and our great friend Lisa Ramsey (who was originally going to be a silhouette in the lit window of the house). We preferred nobody in the shot eventually.

The twigs overlaid on the grass was a good first start, but it didn’t look LARGE it made the house look like a scaled down model. I then turned to fire rendering techniques from some really tacky and cheesy websites where they teach you Photoshop tricks, like how to write your name out in fire, or in gold. I took this knowledge and went really far with it - I embellished the flame with some real shots of fire from our barbecue grill from memorial day (my dad was squirting tons of lighter fluid into our backyard grill).


Slv When did you first realise you wanted to be a designer?

A.S. I don’t want to be a designer. I want to be a musician. I am working on my own album right now.


Slv How did you get your first break? (e.g. the first piece of design work that you actually gave a shit about)

A.S. I started in middle school, someone punched me in the stomach for wearing a Mossimo shirt in the halls and I was so infuriated that I couldn’t wear a shirt, that I started researching ringer t-shirts (very skater style at the time). I took a picture of the tide bottle with a 1 megapixel camera (that was a lot at the time) and went over the words TIDE in paintbrush to make it say ZINE. then i did the same with a Chinese takeout box.

I made about 30 shirts and sold them all to the hottest girls in my middle school through a top secret mole in my math class. He had the in.


Slv How did you first get involved with Greg Gillis (AKA Girl Talk)?

A.S. He used to see me around in the cafeteria in college and vice versa – he looked like Rivers Cuomo and I looked like some big fat nerd who tucked his shirt in and wore a tie every day (this has greatly changed, now both of us have beards and we wear ugly clothes all the time like a bunch of hippies).

We eventually hung out once with our friends Mike Ray (who is redoing the Illegal Art website and brand with me) and Alex Preston (who is now in the band Mittens on Strings and makes incredible hand made shirts). I remember that night begging for them not to shave a Ninja Turtle face in my hair (they gave me a haircut the first time i met them and we hung out).


Slv Where do you work and what are you working on this week?

A.S. I work at home, in front of Google Spreadsheets, managing my clients. This week I’m working on my album, and doing some promotional flyers and banners for a Big Gay Cruise in Fire Island – should be fun! I also attended an event on Monday night for my friend Jeremy Parker’s record release party (Tha Pumpsta), I wore my costume (Turns out Andrew is also a performance artist - check out Bad Brilliance for more info).


Slv What records are you listening to right now?

A.S. Lil Wayne + Feed The Animals is the heavy duo right now.


Slv You wake up in Brooklyn, you’ve had 1,000,000 beers last night and a magic badger offers you any item of food you like – what would it be?

A.S. Nachos with cheese, ground beef, strips of beef, burger meat, cow beefs, pork, pork beefs, raw chicken, dutch chicken, deep fried halved radishes soaked in duck fat, sour cream, guacamole, blue cheese dressing, crab meat lumps, cheddar cheese, nacho cheese and drizzled with lime and tequila and flame torched for like 3 seconds or so.

You can check out lots more of Andrew’s work at his website including some excelllent photography.



Strasser also did the above cover for White Williams’ “Smoke” – you can check out the intriguing story behind it at Paper Thin Walls.

My good friend John Foley of bite! informs me that Adrian Shaughnessy is interviewing legendary graphic designer Storm Thorgerson on Resonance FM today. Storm is most famous for his album covers for Pink Floyd such as the iconic sleeve for Dark Side of the Moon (below). You can listen online at 4pm (GMT) today.

Great cover for this Lindstrom and Prinz Thomas 12" on Eskimo Recordings.



Originally spotted at Iso50.

Scott Hansen turned up this quirky cover for Robert Fripp & Brian Eno’s excellently titled 1973 release, “No Pussyfooting” (a reference to the quick and spontaneous way the record was created). The music involved passing Robert Fripp’s electric guitar through an analogue tape loop developed by Eno, resulting in a deeply layered piece of what would later become known as ambient music. The visual concept of infinitely repeating mirrors perfectly illustrates the qualities of the music in a simple and striking way – design and art direction at it’s purest.

Scott Hansen has an article on this brilliant viral project by New York based designer Nikolay Saveliev. Saveliev created sleeves and inserts carrying faux–academic material on the state of the pop and music industries, but actually promoting indie radio stations. 140 copies were then “snuck” onto the shelves of record shops for browsing punters to discover. Check out the original post for lots more images.

Excellent artwork by Yes Studio for The Stands’ 2005 album. I especially like the fact that it's called “Horse Fabulous” – it's almost enough to make me buy it despite the fact that I don't even like the band.



Originally posted by Scott Hansen.

Excellent ascii-tastic packaging for the "Bugged Out Classics" compilation by Zip Design, who have a tasty website. Head to the CR Blog for more images and info.

A funny and well made guide to the art of Sleevefacing TM. Found at Word Magazine.

Following on from the sleeve art remix posters, John put me onto this brilliant collection of vinyl sleeve heads. David Essex (below) made me laugh. A lot.

I spotted this great series of posters for Neuf Music which brilliantly illustrate the slogan "Make your mix". Shame the website they are advertising is particularly poorly designed.

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'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.