The Long Lost Art of the Album Cover

As a kid in the 1970s and initially inspired by Boston's album artwork, I thought, "Someday, I'm going to design album covers." A big 12x12-inch canvas front and back, plus maybe the sleeve, or a double album that gets you an additional 24x12-inch wall to paint on. It was big and the artwork detailed. And you had enough size for moving parts such as the wheel inside the Led Zeppelin III cover.

By the time I started my graphic design career in the late 1980s we were down to 4.75x4.75-inch CDs. You got to design more pages especially if the artist wanted a little book inside the jewel case, but a serious decrease in artistic real estate. But it still afforded a lot of design latitude.

Today we're down to a few thousand pixels an on little dinky LCD. Granted, the RGB color space provides more dazzling colors than the CMYK color space for printing, but the artwork is down to an avatar of its original self.

What will the next album artwork evolution be?

Now that more music lovers are buying individual songs rather than whole albums, is album artwork on the edge of extinction—a lost medium like frescos. Will graphic designers be employed to design cover artwork for individual songs? If so, we truly have traded quantity for quality.