Adam Lambert: For Your Entertainment

“Thank you to those who appreciate and understand that the album cover is deliberately campy. It’s an omage to the past. It IS ridiculous” and “For those that don’t get it: oh well… Glad to have gotten your attention.” [Adam Lambert on Twitter]

Hope for music design in 2008

With all the talk about CD and DVD sales plummeting and digital downloads taking the place of something you can hold in your hands and examine, I decided I better hop on the A-train quickly or be relegated to the CD/DVD graphic design scrap heap.

Let me first explain that I am actually old enough to have designed my first album cover in 1974. From there, the industry took a pretty abrupt leap to the smaller format of compact discs while still retaining the need for a graphic designer to design the physical packaging.

With digital downloading on the rise, my first thoughts were, “Great, another product line of graphic design I will have to drop.” Not so fast. Seems, that maybe this whole switcheroo won’t be as bad as I first thought.

Antony Bruno has written an article for Billboard magazine titled, “Digital album packaging should improve in 2008.” It’s well worth the time to read for anyone even remotely interested in the future of graphic design and music. Read Bruno's article here.

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ABBA, "The Visitors" - The first CD turns 25

The compact disc celebrated its 25th birthday last week. That's an eternity in technology years. In case you were wondering, the first CD to come off the press was ABBA's "The Visitors" — off a Philips assembly line in Germany on Aug. 17, 1982, to usher in a fruitful new age of the music industry.

The disc was art directed by Rune Soderqvist. The following is a short biography for Soderqvist from the official ABBA website:

Rune Söderqvist was born in 1935. After working in the advertising business for a number of years, by the 1970s he had his own design studio. He started working with ABBA in late 1975, designing the original Swedish sleeve for their Greatest Hits album.

The following year he invented the famous ABBA logo with the backwards B. Rune’s thinking was that each B (Björn and Benny) should be turned towards each A (Agnetha and Anni-Frid) since they were two couples. Rune went on to design every subsequent album sleeve for ABBA, from Arrival in 1976 until the posthumous ABBA Live ten years later.

The title Arrival was suggested by Rune’s common-law wife at the time, Lillebil Ankarcrona. The sleeve for Super Trouper featured ABBA surrounded by dressed-up friends and acquaintances, as well as real circus performers. For The Visitors, Rune’s sleeve concept was to think of the ”visitors” as angels, which led to the group posing in front of a painting of an angel.

Rune was also the visual architect behind ABBA’s tour of Europe and Australia in 1977, and the tour of North America and Europe in 1979. After the ABBA years he has continued working as a designer, also achieving success in the field of art.

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