July 25, 2005
Classic Album Covers of the 60s
That's the book by legendary cover artist Storm Thorgerson. He is most known for his designs for Pink Floyd. In the book Storm critiques cover design concepts, colors and fonts of over 200 of the "Best Covers of the Decade". He gives inside views on how the psychedelic movement affected cover design.
Storm has authored several books on album cover design, including 100 Best Album Covers.
Posted by Rico | PermalinkHistoric Album Cover Collectable Art To Assist Cancer Research Efforts
NEW YORK, July 19 /PRNewswire/ -- Major classic rock music personalities will appear in a series of signed, limited edition commemorative album cover prints produced to raise funds for cancer research, it was announced today by the T.J. Martell Foundation and WYD MediaManagement, LLC.
Posted by Rico | PermalinkJuly 21, 2005
Unique CD Design Packaging System
Doing a short dvd or cd duplication run? Looking for your design to stand out from the ordinary jewel case crowd? Then the Jewelboxing system might be for you. They provide all the components for your cd or dvd design - perforated and scored super bright paper, adhesive disc labels, the sleek Super Jewel Boxes with their rounded corners, and templates for popular software packages.
Jewelboxing is the best solution we've seen for do-it-yourself cd packaging design that is truly unique.
Posted by Rico | PermalinkJuly 20, 2005
UPDATE on 'Superman' story
what follows is an update to our previous entry from July 10
UPDATE: An agreement has been reached for record's the first run that allows Superman to stay on the cover. Any and all future runs will be without Superman. No legal action was ever taken or threatened by DC Comics. The label in question, Asthmatic Kitty, delayed the release strictly on the advice of their own lawyers (and made some good publicity press in the meantime).
You can read more here
Posted by Rico | PermalinkJuly 15, 2005
Artist Paul Cannell Suicide
Album cover artist Paul Cannell took his own life on July 5, 2005. He was a musician himself, forming the band Crawl in the 90's. His most renowned work was Primal Screams release Screamadelica (pictured below)
more info here
Posted by Rico | Permalink | Comments (3)July 12, 2005
Wal-Mart Bogarts Willie's Cover
Wille Nelson ran two different cover design versions of his latest release, Countryman. Wal-Mart's strict guidelines for potentially objectionable package design would have kept the cd off the shelves at the retailer. Countryman is a reggae album from the redheaded stranger, and it features a marijuana leaf on the cover - except at Wal-Mart. Universal Music Group Nashville, Willie's label had a 'clean' version created, changing the marijuana leaf into a palm tree.
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before |
after |
It reminds me of David Bowie's band, Tin Machine. Their second release, Tin Machine II had nude male Greek statues on the cover. Their label did a 'clean' version for the US market that blurred out the statues' uhhh.... naughty bits. Here's the original cover, not available in the US.
Browse iTunes by cover design - UPDATED
UPDATE - Sept 21, 2005
New feature added in version 1.3 - "CoverBuddy now lets you distribute your music collection to the network. Use any web browser to browse albums and remote control playback. It's great for office use and other areas with more than one computer, making it easy to control music playback from every machine. You're lucky if you own a Sony Playstation Portable – we built one version of the Web Interface optimized for the web browser of the PSP!" CoverBuddy promotional email
CoverBuddy's network browser
ORIGINAL POST
In our view, anything that helps cd cover design and liner notes make the transition to digital along with the music is good good good. So we like CoverBuddy. It's an app that lets you view your iTunes collection like it was a jukebox, browsing through the cd cover art designs. You click on a cover, choose a track and it plays - sweet! There's a search box just like iTunes', which can search cd title, artist, album etc. There's a full screen mode and you can actively scale the size of the covers ala iPhoto.
2 hitches - it's Macintosh only and it will not automatically retrieve cd designs from the net due to legal concerns. For automatic cover art retrieval for iTunes try M-Beat. CoverBuddy does however provide a link to the album's amazon.com page where you can drag the cover directly from the browser window.
CoverBuddy is $24.95 and M-Beat is $10.00.
Posted by Rico | Permalink | Comments (1)July 10, 2005
Superman flies off album cover
Another copyright/trademark infringement issue based on a cd cover design. This time it's the Man of Steel. Artist Sufjan Stevens' cd release, Illinois, contained an image of the chicago skyine with Superman flying above. On legal advice, Stevens' label, Asthmatic Kitty has asked retailers not to sell the cds, and there is no word on a release date for the newly designed cd.
The "Fair Use" legal argument probably don't fly here... bad pun.
More details here
Posted by Rico | PermalinkJuly 09, 2005
Bad Nike! Bad Nike!
I would hate to be the creative director for Nike skatebording. They um.. borrowed, or basically recreated the cover art of 80's punk band Minor Threat, with a name twist and of course different shoes. No permission was requested from the band's label, who were needless to say, upset (at least publicly - a temporary 'spike' in the album's sales is sure to result).
Perhaps Nike thought it will pass under the radar, maybe it was pure publicity for all, or maybe somewhere a designer, a creative director and company learned a hard hard lesson about copyright.
For the record, Nike apologized - more coverage here
Posted by Rico | Permalink
