CD Art

Album Art

Everybody's talking about the demise of the album sleeve - that the new age of mp3 downloads will make CD packaging obsolete and hence the imagery that signposts, maps out the music within and gives recording artists the opportunity to speak visually to their fans, create icons, give intensity or mystery and add visual memory to their music.

Record covers and CD sleeves have always been a no-holds place for designers and fine artists to play, try out some of their more experimental ideas and put them on show for all the world to see. And record sleeve design is on the edge - inevitably a testing ground for ideas that will eventually filter down through other visual and graphic mediums and into the public psyche. Marshal McLuhan argued (in Understanding Media) that every new medium carries the old medium as its content, so let's assume that new technology will enhance our creative ability to visualize music with artwork.

Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band

The Beatles

Artist: Peter Blake

For your pleasure, a gallery of record sleeves old and new; some you'll know but some you may have missed. They're sleeves that we like, from our own collections - all created by fine artists, some of them famous, others by artists for their own record sleeves. In every case artists, photographers, designers and musicians have worked together to create a visual shorthand for the music.