- Album cover design is an area often overlooked
by design historians.
The subject matter was music not intellectual concepts.
There was no philosophical manifesto.
It was an art form that existed to sell records.
If you ask anyone who lived during the time
when people actually bought records,
they will light up when discussing their favorite record,
and be able to describe the cover in detail.
Great emotional weight is contained with the combination
of personal involvement with the music,
an artifact of the album cover.
The designers of the late 1960s and 1970s
working in this field were a special breed.
They were the first rockstar graphic designers.
Other designers knew them by name,
and they were promoted along with the covers.
The styles were loose and open-ended.
One cover might be modernest and simple;
another, complex and decorative.
There was no attachment to a specific idea.
Each solution might be radically different from the last.
The industry thrived in Los Angeles and New York,
the two centers of the music industry.
Designers, such as Roland Young
produced an enormous body of work.
The free wheeling approach of the 1970s is evident
in the mix of media, style, and ideas.
Budgets were large and a designer could hire
the best illustrators and photographers.
Unique packaging techniques were added as the album covers
became more than simply a way to hold a record.
Most album covers depict the band name
and a photograph of the band, or musician.
The best examples of album cover design
rely on abstraction or symbols.
This may seem easy,
but removing a photo of the band was a difficult battle
with the artists, agents, record companies, and executives
but when it was possible, great results emerged.
The emotional connection to a physical artifact
is lost with MP3 downloads.
These great album covers prove the power of design
to reach the viewer as an individual.
The rejection of following one dogma
explicitly makes sense
after the radical changes of the 1960s.
The album cover provided
a perfect vehicle for personal connection to design.
As the decade moved from being the
'We' generation of the 60s
to the 'Me' generation of the 70s.