Think of your favorite album—you know, that desert-island disc that you'd seriously consider abandoning your dog for if your house caught fire and you had to make a choice. Ok, for those of us with streaming subscriptions, those albums that your fingers can't possibly scroll past without adding to the queue. Regardless the format, everyone has a few albums that they consider absolutely crucial to their continued existence; what sometimes troubles us most about these indispensible masterworks—artists and designers especially—is that some of them are not visually represented as adequately as they should be.
In other words, some of the best albums the ears have ever heard have album covers that make us wish we didn't have eyes.
In this post, I'll examine a few of my own favorite albums that just never did anything to deserve the artwork they're stuck behind and either fix these works using the tools of proper balance, composition, color, and typesetting, or, for those that are beyond repair, redesign them from the ground up.
This is going to be fun.
The Bats – Daddy's Highway (1987)
From the first few bars of "Treason," you're hit with a wave of nostalgia for a time you didn't know had already passed. Robert Scott's jangly guitar and Paul Kean's spastic bass lines weave a colorful tapestry over which Kaye Woodward's somewhat mournful leads and haunting backing vocals float—driven mercilessly onward by Malcolm Grant's pounding and skipping beats. Just about every song follows this formula or some approximation of it, and it never gets old.
But, that cover.
Not only does the ventroliquist's dummy have no relation to paternal stretches of pavement spanning large distances OR nocturnal winged mice, it's downright terrifying to look at. And the extended grotesk typeface chosen for both the artist name and album name, without any regard to weight, point size, or any contrast in style at all makes this cover truly hard to behold.
Listening to this album always makes me think of the early jangle rock bands that inspired modern indie rock bands like Band of Horses, The Shins, and Parquet Courts—bands like R.E.M., Miracle Legion, The Smiths, and Orange Juice. Drawing from the emerging alternative/independent scene that The Bats were helping to form in 1987 and into the early nineties, I felt a redesign of this cover from scratch was in order. I began by incorporating elements of written typefaces and "trashed" typewriter faces that were becoming an extremely popular piece of the aesthetic of late eighties/early nineties indie rock and opted for an overall grainy, aged look and feel, finally pulling in some vintage anthropomorphic animal portraits to complete the motif. The band's name was set in Beatrice, a slab serif typeface that conveys a bit of The Bats' fanciful, whimsical, playful sonic stylings.
And, voilà .
Album artwork, like any artwork, is highly subjective, and therefore is held either beautiful or grotesque in the eye of the beholder. However, as we learned in my post Less is More (Until it's Less), art for mass consumption—otherwise known as design—should be concerned with form and function, allowing one to inform the other. In the case of good cover design, we take into consideration how the music feels, how it makes us feel, and we snap a picture of the mental imagery that it invokes in us and then transfer that to screen and, ultimately, printed art.
There are millions of other solutions to this problem, which is why the business of design will always thrive. What solution might you cook up if given the opportunity? Let me know in the comments!
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