THEO VARNAVAS
MA EDITORIAL DESIGN
Will music cover art be dematerialized or reinvented in a digital age and how can design expand the functions of music? Theo Varnavas theo@halfdouble.com MA Editorial Design MAHKU 2012 / August Utrecht Netherlands
CONTENTS
Prologue / Introducing Shrinkage 1-3 ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................... Haunted by a Ghostly Medium / Added and Fabricated Value 4-9 ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................... The Fragmentation of the Concept Album / Shifting Thematic Unification 10-17 ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................... Epilogue / A Better Tomorrow 18-21 ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................... Notes 22-23 .............................................................................................................................................................................................................................. Bibliography 24-27
WILL MUSIC COVER ART BE DEMATERIALIZED OR REINVENTED IN A DIGITAL AGE AND HOW CAN DESIGN EXPAND THE FUNCTIONS OF MUSIC?
PROLOGUE
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Introducing Shrinkage It was a seemingly ordinary morning of 1938, ten years before the LP format was even introduced when twenty three year old Alex Steinweiss walked into his boss’s office, to suggest a new approach to the presentation and packaging of the 78 RPM record album, commonly known as the phonograph album. The reality at the time had music records being sold and distributed via hardware and appliance stores in plain brown paper bags or heavy books imprinted with gold or silver lettering. Having custom artwork displayed on music albums was a radical idea at the time, and even though it didn’t originate from Steinweiss [1], Columbia’s approval of his preposition would give the young designer a once in a lifetime opportunity in defining the aesthetics and dynamics of modern album cover art for generations to come. The heads up from Columbia Records gave Steinweiss the green light and marked the beginning of an era full of influential cover art that had everyone craving a piece of the action. Since the arrival of the LP record sleeve in 1948, presented by Columbia, and until the beginning of the CD era in the mid 1980’s, the music industry was blooming, its peak being the 1970’s. During that time, album art got a lot of attention from the media and companies started using this vibrant art form for visually defining their releases. The increased interest came with oversized budgets and attracted many well-known artists from all over the world. Some of the names included Andy Warhol, Richard Avedon and Norman Rockwell. Albums from artists like Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin became cultural icons. The music was monumental and the cover art was stunning, sometimes even interactive [Fig. 01]. Many labels such as Blue Note were utilizing the LP sleeve as a way to grow a recognizable brand that the public could relate to and trust.
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PROLOGUE
FIGURE 01
Detail on Velvet Underground & Nico’s album (1967). Designed by Andy Warhol, one could actually peel the banana skin right off.
PROLOGUE
Then the mysterious silver audio disc came around in 1985 receiving highly mixed feelings from the consumers and mostly frowned upon by music labels, collectors and music aficionados. Designers didn’t care about it either as it reduced their canvas to one third of the glorious twelve inches square of the LP sleeve. They just ignored it, designing as they would for the LP and then scaling down to fit. However, the real issue wasn’t just the smaller size, which could still be made up in depth through additional pages and sides [2], as much as the complete change the CD was about to bring in terms of directly and utterly changing the current technological standards and bringing digital music into the picture forever. The amazing technological potential that the CD blew in with it, combined with its, according to many, unappealing dimensions and appearance were in part the very reasons for the demise of music cover art and the subsequent dematerialization of music that we are well familiar with today. The silver disc, the new medium, significantly smaller than its predecessor was in fact just stuck in the way between the glorious vinyl and total digitalism. After enormous efforts by all the major labels to find a way to lock away music on this format forever it was apparent that it wouldn’t work. The indifference for the compact disc was dead obvious among most circles and often came out in the form of caustic statements like this one: “It has always seemed to be what it has turned out to be, a banal bastard stopgap between the perfection of vinyl and the moment when music is transported into our lives without the need for an object.”
MORLEY / THE GUARDIAN / 2003 Now the CD is being rendered obsolete, the major labels have concluded that the blueprint for survival is freely selling digital music online, and we are moving towards a re-
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ality where thumbnails-as-cover art prevail. I-Tunes’ version of an album’s cover is a 16k, 150px image. Even though, these are enough in most cases to be able to tell which album you are listening to, they are not quite enough to make the separation between exceptional art and cheap DIY collage. As a result, this gradual but factual deterioration of music cover art makes a lot of people unhappy; whether they are designers, musicians, conscious label owners or just music lovers. The main problem everyone seems to have with this deterioration is that the tangibility was taken out of the equation leading to seemingly less personal experiences connected to music. Jon Wozencroft, founder of Touch very well puts it like this: “You need some kind of holistic, reconciling agent alongside the music, some editorial aspect that functions as a gentle storytelling device alongside the invisible force of the music.”
SHAUGHNESSY / 2008 This essay will attempt, through analysis and exploration to investigate the deterioration of cover art related to music under various prisms wholly or partly coupled with design, music and technology, while trying to understand and potentially bridge the gap between the digital and the tangible. It will delve into both the abstract and the practical, looking into new ways of communicating materiality through the use of electronic media as well as the possibility to attach digital value to a tangible object. This is a personal quest, not in documenting visual solutions depicted from music cultures, but instead in finding ways to create strong visual emotional experiences to accompany the invisible force of the music. I will not be looking at the subject only as a designer but also as an avid music listener and enthusiastic follower of all things related to technology.
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HAUNTED BY A GHOSTLY MEDIUM
FIGURE 02
Philip Beesley is a responsive architect. Hylozoism [picture] is the belief that all matter is alive. Beesley infuses materials we have always considered inanimate with life-like systems, functions, and movements, thus transforming our idea of synthetic life from cold and robotic to gentle (a word Beesley uses often), empathetic, or almost nurturing.
HAUNTED BY A GHOSTLY MEDIUM
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Added / Fabricated Value Good music is always personal and the most authentic experiences associated with such a disposition used to come in the form of irreplaceable highly-detailed physical objects, often regarded as prized possessions and items of great value by their proud and often slightly obsessed owners, back in the day. Many will admit that technology moved too fast potentially skipping a few frames of the process we needed to go through along this journey to digitalism. People sure appreciate the ease of use and high accessibility associated with digital content, as well as the rising opportunities in accessing visually enhanced material through technological means, but they still seem to need real straight forward tangibility. This is made apparent by the strong presence the vinyl record managed to re-establish after its disappearance over the past few years, even among younger audiences. “Acknowledging the “power of things” not only provides new insight into many phenomena, but also changes the way we relate to the world, as we step away from our contemporary, arguably hazardous human centered worldview.”
VAN DARTEL & KASPRZAK / 2012 According to many in the art world, like Philip Beesley [Fig. 02] and Markus Kison, both exhibitors at the “Power of Things” by DEAF, a vital force is to be attributed to non-living things as much as living ones in a sense that everyday objects can change our perspective, mood or even relations with other people. Things like buildings can change the natural terrain; guns can promote fear and so on. In the same way, music albums in their physical form can have multiple functions for different people.
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HAUNTED BY A GHOSTLY MEDIUM
FIGURE 03
The inside of a record store. Before iTunes there was a place where you could actually go and buy music. Good record stores were defined by their collections as well as the knowledge of its employees.
HAUNTED BY A GHOSTLY MEDIUM
Since for most of us today space is becoming limited and valuable, one would think that we would be generally careful in selecting the items –or music albums for that matter– to occupy our space. Whether we interact with these things on a regular basis depends on their nature and function. However no matter what the function is, people can get emotionally attached to objects because of the unique circumstances through which they were acquired. Even though the object is frequently not important in its intended function, it possesses another function completely unrelated to its inherent one; triggering anamneses related to the owner’s own experiences, acquaintances and emotions. I have met people living in tiny apartments literally buried in their vinyl records or books, sacrificing meals to buy that special limited edition sleeve. Others collect old football cards. Music releases often happen only on vinyl apart from the web and new trading games pop up every so often reminding us, despite all the digital content that can theoretically top it all, that people need things. People like to collect things for all kinds of reasons. Some collect to show individualism, others may collect decorative items or items which satisfy their personal aesthetics. Mainly though, people collect in an attempt to relive the past, as Terry Shoptaugh writes in one of his articles. “We use keepsakes to stimulate memory, especially to trigger fond memories. But even if memory cannot be relied upon to reproduce a record of the past; it remains vital to our understanding of the past.”
SHOPTAUGH / THE HERITAGE PRESS / 1991 As objects get old with time, so do the memories, so do all of us. People like such physical reminders of time
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because they allow them to reminisce on where they started from and where they are at. A personal story or a sum of stories enclosed in a vessel whose value is hard to be put into context. The thought that it can break if mishandled, or rendered useless by the hand of time if not treated properly, causes the kind of static that makes people value it even more. We could call it the third dimension, a dimension which physically encloses us and our musical artifacts all the same, causing a connection whose general grammar immediately disappears be it attempted to be translated in a virtual environment. In an era where we can actually buy music in our underpants without leaving our chair and the good old record store is replaced by iTunes and the World Wide Web, how can we feel close to our music again and find value among thousands of mp3 files sitting inside endless playlists, shuffling away in a chaotic course that never ends? The knowledge of the employees at any record store –in the traditional sense– and the overall atmosphere of the place, were both of instrumental value in defining a successful establishment. The dynamics of the record store change completely when attempted to recapture in a digital web environment and the real social factor tends to get lost in translation of a medium that is lacking substance by definition. Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips mentions on Record Store Day: “The cool record store…is where you can talk to people who are like you. They look like you, think like you and, like the same music as you –the only comparable experience these days would probably be an art museum– an actual place where you can stand and simply be surrounded by your heroes.”
CALAMAR & GALLO / 2009
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HAUNTED BY A GHOSTLY MEDIUM
FIGURE 04
Beck - The Information. Released in 2004 this CD album’s cover started off as a blank canvas that could be customized upon purchase by using a series of provided stickers for a more custom look.
HAUNTED BY A GHOSTLY MEDIUM
The other side of the same coin of what Coyne is describing is the mp3 cloud that’s floating over us in the form of invisible travelling data. No real value seems to be placed on digital music and no real thought seems to be taking place when one is contemplating on buying –or stealing– a new music track. As a consequence, there is no feeling of real ownership and while one has the possibility to enjoy the sound at almost surrealistic levels through high definition audio speakers and amplifiers, they cannot follow the music visually or connect to it emotionally much like they would with the LP sleeve. “Do we love our objects of desire, our CDs and vinyl, because we can touch them and explore at our leisure, and because they are not communal like the virtual flotsam of the internet? Of course we do.”
THORGERSON & DEAN / 2008 Some of today’s solutions concerning music cover art in general come from conscious visionaries like Jeff Jank of Stones Throw Records, who dream of a better digital reality for the thematic album and its cover art, a good number from money hungry record labels whose actions make obvious they believe people are stupid, and others from kids with excessive free time. For the sake of this essay, I would like to split the effects of today’s music promotion and distribution solutions, in regard to technology, in two broad categories. Those that provide Added Value, either by introducing new information –be it in the form of visuals or text– or create new personal connections with the musician in a human scale manner, and those that look at ways of exploiting everyday needs to brainwash the public through mass distribution creating what I like to call Fabricated Value.
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Having technology at their fingertips can often tempt executives and record labels to forget all about the possible ethical implications their actions carry, in a straight forward mission to increase revenue. And that’s about when the value stops being added and begins being fabricated. When music downloads get married to McDonald’s meals and Amazon orders, music starts looking more and more like a commodity. Just like all tools can be used for “good” or “evil” so can technology. Mobile wallpapers, that are practically thumbnails downloaded at extra charge, annoying ringtones and songs given out for free not only fail in creating a strong visual identity connected to the artists, but manage to devalue music even further by projecting it as secondary and making it appear cheap. Of course it goes without saying that most times the quality and nature of the promotion is directly connected to that of the artist in question. “These promotions seem less like the next generation of album art and more like the buttons, stickers and other trinkets used to promote bands in the analogue days. The difference is that a ringtone might help build awareness of a group, but it does not add new information the way good album art does.”
GRIMES / FT MAGAZINE / 2006
10 THE FRAGMENTATION OF THE CONCEPT ALBUM
FIGURE 05
Album cover by “The Alan Parsons Project”, an English progressive rock band that mostly dealt with producing concept albums.
THE FRAGMENTATION OF THE CONCEPT ALBUM 11
Shifting Thematic Unification Some might argue that the positive side is being overlooked here and that certain partnerships between the record labels and retail chains make music more widely available and help consumers discover new artists to listen to. Pairing a fast food meal with a music download will add one song to your mp3 collection that often doesn’t have the capacity to stand out on its own due to the fact that it was actually meant to be part of a bigger concept album. Maybe it was never meant to stand out on its own in its conception anyway. In any case, this kind of behavior regularly causes the real essence of music to fade out of context into the vast media cloud and doesn’t allow for thematic perception through the eyes of the listener. Perhaps the importance of having complete albums with a singular thematic focus was brought down quite a few notches, partly because of the public’s behavioral patterns. With the possibility to now create their own compilation albums or playlists, the general public chose variety over thematic unification the same way they chose convenience over physical objects when digital music came to be. In turn, most of the mainstream artists and bands decided that if the majority of listeners were not going to listen to their album all the way through, with the tracks in the order the band had intended, the effort to produce a concept album was not worth it at all. Today’s music platforms feature all sorts of trinkets and functionality to help you choose the music to listen to and/or purchase from the vast cloud. Available tracks in all the popular music platforms are subject to a rating system that is meant to give an insight on popularity and can therefore create hype around certain tracks. If a piece of music has many bars or stars then it is considered to be good. In some cases this is the only criterion for a good portion of the users, leading many to purchase music not based on interest or personal opinion but on popularity instead. A
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FIGURE 06
Screenshot of the “Biophilia” app by Bjork. It has been described by many as “a holistic music experience”. Definite added value to the digital.
THE FRAGMENTATION OF THE CONCEPT ALBUM 13
feature that sometimes works but most times it does not. The need to buy a complete album as a wholesome package is slowly being eliminated. The result sits in the form of scattered mp3 files on one’s hard drive that just lie there, and after a while turn to outdated fragments that were never meant to be embraced as something bigger. The single means of separation of origin? The small thumbnail on the bottom left of the screen depicting a glimpse of the album cover now fading into nonexistence. For the reasons outlined in the previous paragraphs, a lot of the album covers assigned to music releases suddenly start looking more generic too. Thematic unification of the music logically resulted to a clearer communication with the designer who was then able to create more meaningful cover art enveloping a strong concept they could envision. It is considerably harder to show something to others clearly if you cannot see it yourself. Subsequently, effective cover art that stays in sync with the theme of the music has the power to expand the original concept even further, while at the same time, cover art that does not maintain consistency with the music eliminates the need for its very existence altogether. Even when different pieces of music on an album appear seemingly unrelated, being able to find one common attribute that unifies all tracks even in the most abstract way, is often the deciding factor for an individual to establish deep relations with the music. This, in substantial parts, is the job of the designer. By finding that image or combination of images that have the power to capture a uniform emotion about the complete album on one hand, and each track individually on the other, simultaneously, insight can be triggered by the listener on the general idea of the album and create a strong first impression even prior to playing it. Just like the eyes constitute the mirror of the soul, the album cover should reflect the quality, emotion and overall
direction found within the music album. Most albums that made it into the classics, whether seen from an acoustic perspective or a design perspective had at least one common denominator in regard to thematic unification [3]. Concept albums can be even more effectual when they are part of a yet greater concept that is directly connected to the general image and feeling the band wants to convey. Blue Note was a good example in employing this method since the 1970s. Reid Miles became known for using familiar and recycled graphical elements, colors and blended styles from Jazz, Funk and other genres to establish a uniform look in an attempt to grow a recognizable brand through the company’s releases. Having the same designer produce all the covers should have definitely helped a lot as it was easier for consistency to be preserved in the overall mood. Ever since the record industry was born, bands and record labels have been using a bunch of ways to create a strong visual identity around them. Matching outfits became popular among bands in the 1970s in an attempt to better portray the values of the band as something bigger and show uniformity and dedication, versus individual style and selfishness [4]. Visual identity in music -as much as the thematic album- is built around a general concept without it being restricted to one medium. It aims in fact to unify a brand across all sorts of media. Since exposure was limited during the golden age of music and video technology and the World Wide Web hadn’t yet come into existence, branding was mainly limited to the album covers, live shows, magazine ads, promotions in record stores and the radio, as well as limited edition collector’s items and other memorabilia. Today’s vast internet media culture does not make the job any easier as it causes the general majority to spend very little
14 THE FRAGMENTATION OF THE CONCEPT ALBUM
FIGURE 07
The Symbolic Table by Dutch organization Mediamatic is an interface free media player. It uses RFID tags inside objects that the table can pick up.
THE FRAGMENTATION OF THE CONCEPT ALBUM 15
time in finding new music. Bands today have to make their music easily accessible while at the same time offer their listeners wholesome experiences, memories and emotions. It is exactly what music has to offer though, that builds exciting brands like KISS, AC/DC and Ozzy Osbourne. Music branding, if used and targeted correctly can turn a onetime buyer into a loyal fan. “Brand loyalty does not happen overnight. It takes several repeated interactions with the band and its message, and that holds true even in today’s fast paced Internet culture. Far more musical groups fall by the wayside every day due to lack of a clear, focused identity than due to lack of talent. You not only have to reach your target audience, you have to know what you are reaching them for.”
BARFOOT / CHRISTIAN / 2011 Luckily, not all is dark and gloomy in the face of our digital present and future, both in relevance with the concept album and cover art in general. The way is forward and a lot of record labels are working to make digital album art mean something again and return to the perception of the music album as a wholesome concept or story. Reasonably enough, the process of designing seems to have shifted in big measures from traditional album covers to internet websites and mobile applications over the past decade. A huge part of the added value comes in the frame of mobile applications. By taking advantage of the latest advancements in technology, designers and developers are able to employ techniques that manage to expose a new kind of media materiality found in modern handheld devices like iPods, smartphones and tablets, often quite cleverly. A good recent example is the aug-
mented reality app designed by Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas titled BEP360 released for the iPhone. It’s a Black Eyed Peas app enabling a 360 degree video experience. The app was built around the music video of the band, “The Time”. By moving their mobile phone around on a 360 degree axis, viewers can experience different aspects of the video. The app is coupled with an AR-enabled album cover, community comments, and the band’s live twitter feed. Augmented reality offers a lot of potential that’s directly connected to the user being able to interact with the music in a visual way, bringing new information into the picture in a similar fashion good album cover art does. Other similar examples include the Biophilia app designed for the artist Björk [5]. The social element most of these apps seem to share is also significant and while we are still far from capturing the Record Store atmosphere in a digital environment, it makes sense to try and make use of the existing social media tools that people use every day and are more or less familiar with. The amazing possibilities modern technology is able to offer when it comes to expanding music visually, along with the fact that more and more people give into buying smart phones and handheld players every day to be used in conjunction with modern social media platforms, are only a few of the reasons new music apps pop out every so often. Music applications and other music related digital solutions basically attempt to exploit a form of media tangibility from within the digital. Other approaches focus on attempting to assign digital value to various tangible objects. Usually these objects serve as digital triggers and are always objects that exist in the physical world. Picture a toy cow that on the exact moment it is placed on a table, a sound or video can be triggered and played through the table’s internal speakers. This is roughly the idea behind the Symbolic Table by the Dutch company Mediamatic. It was originally
16 THE FRAGMENTATION OF THE CONCEPT ALBUM
FIGURE 08
The C60 Redux, designed by IDEO as a concept player, features RFID “mixtapes” with two sides as a remedy to point and click.
THE FRAGMENTATION OF THE CONCEPT ALBUM 17
developed as a concept to bridge the gap between the tactile and the medial by employing RFID technology, consisting of the tags that can be placed on or in objects, and an RFID reader implemented inside the table top. Just like that, any digital file can be attached to a physical object that serves as its reference in the three dimensional world. The object can be anything big enough to enclose an RFID tag somewhere around the size of a grain of rice. Other clever examples include the Reactable [6] and the C60 by Ideo Labs that goes a step further in customizing the interface specifically for music. In a nutshell, like the Symbolic Table, it also makes use of RFID technology in addition to pieces of cardboard resembling mix tapes that feature an A and a B side with one track on each. By tossing the “mix tape� on the smooth looking interface, playback begins, triggered by the RFID reader picking up the tag and initiating playback through an ordinary computer. The pieces of cardboard can be arranged on the interface in a clock wise fashion in order to create playlists.
18 EPILOGUE
FIGURE 09
Logo ideas for the general concept in a bar setting as one of the parts of an older project. The idea was around a small place with focus on the social factor.
EPILOGUE 19
For a Better Tomorrow All of the concepts stated above comprise exciting general solutions addressed to specific problems within the astronomical field of music and its dematerialization. While common ground can definitely be found between these ideas, their essential differences are what make them inspiring. If instead of trying to solve certain problems, one was after creating a new user experience fueled from traditional values connected to vinyl rituals, in unison with the potential modern technology has to offer, what would the emerging solution consist of then? On one hand we have the convenience and ease of use that accompanies digital music, and on the other hand the emotional tangible value an object like a vinyl record can deliver. If the two were to be combined to form a new music experience, its basic premise should not defeat the original purpose of convenience and accessibility that digital music brings while at the same time manage to capture the music playing rituals and social nature of the record store, both found in past times. It would need to bring new information into the picture, just like good cover art does while giving the listeners an object to worship without compromising functionality in absence of it. In essence, it needs to have a strong interactivity factor that combines Andy Warhol’s peeling banana cover combined, in an obscure salad, with recent mobile applications while keeping the two functioning independently. For the better part of the past year I have been researching various subjects coupled to music and design. By trying to build on existing solutions and having looked at a good number of alternative interfaces I can safely say I now get what they do and what they never will. They are succesful in addressing a problem and providing a way to eliminate unnescessary interfaces, but generally unsuccesful in providing value and consistency through the actual mediun. With the word “medium� here I am not referring to the device
20 EPILOGUE
FIGURE 10
A few logo ideas I made for the concept as a movement a while back. The idea was to play with numers to come up with a catchy name.
SQUARE
EPILOGUE 21
but rather to what is played by the device. In the case where the device is a CD player, the medium is the CD of course. My medium of choice to attempt and attribute value to is an RFID embedded card, a route that was travelled before, but until now did not point to a clear destination. Each card will represent an album as a rule of thumb and upon placing the card on a button-less interface, the script will point to the corresponding entry within the Spotify music platform so music can start playing. I chose Spotify because it does not require the music to be stored locally, but can “pull” the tracks from an endless online database. It is a perfect example of “the virtual flotsam of the internet”, the media cloud and the end of ownership, while at the same time a great service that lets you find music in a snap. But why would you want to spend money on a card that does not give you any Added Value and that you could easily lose with not much regret? How would you know which card to choose among hundreds of thousands of albums and what would make it special? The answer is, its function.That card is actually part of a greater concept deck and one can use it in a game with their friends, where they can simultaneously entertain themselves and get insight on their favourite artists and albums while interacting with Spotify. There is an element of surprise in the purchase. With a choice of themed decks, according to genre, record label, collaborations etc. they can be mixed and matched as long they are maintained in numbers required by the game rules. Alternate grouping patterns can emerge by combining different decks. The game features a set of very loose rules that allows the space for future evolution. Each primary card is centered around its respective album cover and characterized by interesting comments and facts. Learning about these as you play can be important because it opens the road to new combinations that can take you to victory faster. Apart from the primary cards, there are also the secondary cards, used as the inter-
face between you and certain workabouts of Spotify. There is a volume card, a next track card, a next album card where it applies, pause, stop etc. Everything is controlled with the cards and every card is part of the game. This Added Value to an otherwise already demonstrated concept could be the driving power for it to finally kick off. The Added Value and collectible playing cards could be a great incentive for people to start looking at digital music with a fresh and more emotional perspective. Ultimately whether music cover art will be flat out dematerialized or reinvented is hard to say for sure, standing right on the transition point. The sure thing is that no matter which one of the two happens first the impact will be immense. I personally think that digital music and the World Wide Web have given young people and new bands great opportunities but music lovers will always want something more than just the music. Music cassettes back in the 1980s constituted a deciding factor in bringing rock and punk music into the foreground. However they could never take over the market occupied by the vinyl record. There are in fact many similarities between cassettes and digital music in relevance to cover art, accessibility and portability. Cover art is practically nonexistent or seemingly too insignificant to pay attention to, while accessibility and portability score extremely high in cassette and MP3 players. The same cannot be said for the twelve inch or even the CD for that matter. The way I see it, digital music can never extinguish the need for musical artifacts today; much like the cassette could not dethrone the vinyl back in the 1980s. It is, therefore, our job as designers to try and seal the societal and cultural gaps technology has opened throug the years. The only way we can do this is if we start designing stuff that can function on multiple levels. It’s up to us to attribute value to the areas we think important through smart design solutions.
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NOTES 23
Notes 1
Colored cover art had been used on certain albums from World War I. Each album had the artwork printed and pasted on individually. Some examples of such albums include HMV’s issue of Liza Lehmann’s “In a Persian Garden” and operettas by Edward German and Gilbert & Sullivan, all available by 1918.
2
One of the first to recognize the potential and possibilities the new format had to offer was Stefan Sagmeister; a New York based graphic designer and typographer. While many of his contemporaries thought that music graphics were becoming a bit boring once their old canvas, the vinyl LP cover, had been reduced to the dimensions of a CD, Sagmeister felt that what the CD lacked in size made up in depth through additional pages and sides. H.P. Zinker’s Mountains of Madness won Sagmeister a Grammy nomination in 1994.
3
Some popular concept albums include “The Wall” by Pink Floyd, released in 1979 and David Bowie’s “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars” released in 1972.
4
Early popular examples of band employing uniforms include “Roberto Roena y Su Apollo Sound”, arguably one of the best Latin salsa bands in Puerto Rico, formed in 1969 and 20th Century Steel Band with their album “Warm Heart Cold Steel”, released in 1975.
5
Biophilia is described on the iTunes website as “an extraordinary and innovative multimedia exploration of music, nature and technology by the musician Björk.” Users can interact with it in a lot of different ways while listening to Cosmology, the album’s theme song.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY 25
Bibliography BOOKS
Alex Steinweiss, Jennifer McKnight and Steven Heller For the record: The Life and Work of Alex Steinweiss Princeton Architectural press, 2000 Adrian Shaughnessy Cover Art By: New Music Graphics Laurence King Publishing, 2008 Steve Knopper Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2009 Gary Calamar and Phil Gallo Record Store Days Sterling Publishing, 2009 Roger Dean Album Cover Album Collins Design, 2008 Wax Poetics Wax Poetics Anthology, Volume 1 Wax Poetics Inc. 2007 Clif Stoltze 1000 Music Graphics Rockport publishers, 2008 Saskia Slegers Djax Records – The power of the underground Djax Records, 2001 The Power of Things Festival Guide DEAF, 2012
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BIBLIOGRAPHY 27
Elizabeth Barfoot Christian Rock Brands – Selling Sound in a Media Saturated Culture Lexington Books, 2011 Jacob Lusensky Sounds Like Branding: Use the Power of Music to Turn Consumers Into Fans A&C Black, 2011
ARTICLES
Paul Morley The Magic Circles http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2003/aug/01/2 The Guardian, August 1, 2003 Christopher Grimes Sleeveless in Cyberspace http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/40240090-e0c1-11da90ad-0000779e2340.html#axzz1x3VOjvPP FT Magazine, May 12, 2006 Terry Shoptaugh Why Do We Like Old Things? Some Ruminations on History and Memory http://web.mnstate.edu/archives/NorthwestMN/ShoptaughWhyDoWeLikeOldThings.pdf The Heritage Press, May/June, 1991
WEBSITES
The Album Cover is dead? [http://www.gigwise.com/photos/45429/1/The-Album-Cover-Is-Dead] C60 [http://labs.ideo.com/2011/01/14/c60-evolution-ofan-idea/] Roberto Roena [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberto_ Roena]
THEO VARNAVAS MA EDITORIAL DESIGN