Record Sleeve Collector Kavel Rafferty Interview

Barcelona-based Kavel Rafferty is a collector of record envelopes...Kavel is interviewed here by the Ephemera blog.

Album Art Not Dead Yet

"You are creating a sleeve that you want to be as iconic as possible.... It's got to work when it's a thumbnail on Amazon, it's got to work on the shelves at Tesco, and on the racks at HMV.

With bands being able to sell music online, it frees designers from the constraints of retailers. For years, designers have had to work within the constraints of retailers like Tesco, HMV and Virgin. They dictated the packaging, the dual case CD, because of the racking that was designed specifically to stock dual cases. Years ago, if we proposed an alternative format, it was always knocked back because retailers wouldn't stock it.

But now what is fantastic is that we see bands selling music online, where they can sell either a digital download or offer the option... to buy a special packaging version of the product, that can be mailed to them, that can be any shape, any size and any format."

Tom Hingston, of Tom Hingston Studio, has designed covers for the Rolling Stones, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Gnarls Barkley and others.

Banned Album Covers

Was there ever really a time when you couldn't show a toilet on a product without it being banned from the public's eyes? Seems so quaint now in this day and age, sad to say. Gibson has an interesting list of banned album covers from over the years. Remember the Beatles' butcher cover? The Mamas and the Papas toilet fiasco? Be forewarned, some of these images are not safe for work.

"Everyone thinks it's a dying art," Stoltze explains in his Fort Point Channel studio. "But the truth is that there's a lot of really great things still being done by the small record labels and designers."

So says the author of the new book, 1000 Music Graphics: A compilation of packaging, posters, and other sound solutions in an interview with Christopher Muther at boston.com.

Stoltze is optimistic about the future of album art. I’m trying to be. He things that people will continue to want to have something tangible in their hands instead of just a bunch of digital files. That seems right to me and since it’s something I love to design, here’s to the little flicker of hope that Stoltze has given me.

Play Boys Party

Play Boys Party With The Hotvill's

With all the mourning for the passing of album/CD cover sized art, I thought I would balance everyone's happy memories with this offering.

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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