The 10 Best Album Cover Designs
Graphic design has captivated the eye for decades. For a design to be captivating, it should represent a unique concept with keen compositional skills and aesthetic values. Our love for such designs perhaps stems from the early creations of album cover art in the late 1930s. In honor of these iconic styles in music culture, here is our list of the top 10 album cover designs that are based on the best visual concepts and design principles.
Let us know in the comments if you agree or tell us your favorite album designs!
1.The Velvet Underground & Nico were lucky to work with Andy Warhol on their 1967 debut LP. Warhol wasn’t only the “banana” designer on the cover, he was also one “lazy” but famous producers of the album.
2. Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon album cover was designed by Hipgnosis and George Hardie in 1973. The design has a glass prism dispersing light into color. The cover design represents the band’s stage lighting, lyrics, and “simple and bold” music.
3. Aphex Twins (Richard David James), “the most inventive and influential figure in contemporary electronic music”, released Syro in 2014. The album won the 2015 Grammy Award for Best Dance/Electronic Album. The Designers Republic is responsible for this “typography-based” designed infographics to show the list of gears Aphex Twins used for each song. Also, Aphex Twins’s logo designed by Paul Nicholson has a unique typeface.
4. Jamie Reid designed the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks album cover in 1977. It is a significant example of punk, zine, cut-up, rip-off aesthetics that has a very bold statement.
5. Autechre’s elseq 1–5 album includes 5 songs with different cover design variations for each song. It was designed by the Designers Republic in 2016, and it represents how Autechre creates generative music with generative visuals.
6. I think David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane is the most iconic album cover. The cover photo was taken by photographer Brian Duffy who thought that Bowie’s “flash” face paint idea comes from Elvis Presley’s famous ring Taking Care of Business. The teardrop on his chest creates a visual perfect balance with the face flash paint.
7. Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasure album has another iconic cover which was designed by Peter Saville in 1979. Rolling Stones Magazine claims it is “a black-and-white visualization of pulsar data that looked like digital mountain peaks”.
8. Kenny Gravillis designed The Roots’ Things Fall Apart album cover in 1999. He said he tried to represent “the concept of visual failure in society” on the cover. The original photo is of two black teens running from police in riot gear in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Not only is it a powerful virtual representation of Civil Rights and inequality, but also a remarkably successful dynamic of asymmetrical composition with the perspective and contrast.
9. The 4-year-old cutie on the cover of Nirvana’s 1994 album Nevermind was Spencer Elden. The photographer Kirk Weddle was a friend of Spencer’s dad. We think the concept, a baby (fish) chasing a dollar (bait), is a very clear metaphor.
10. John Hermansader 10. has created album covers for the label Blue Note. Jay Jay Johnson’s 1955 album cover The Eminent Volume 1 is only one of his many iconic designs. Hermansader was a modernist designer who used typography efficiently and related the text with the images on his cover designs.
Bonus: The 1980 album cover of Umit Besen’s Sikayetim Var (I Have a Complaint) is amazing because it is a design of Besen with piano keys and his golden mic flying in the sky, yet he has a complaint. How on earth does a flying person have a complaint? Or is it because Besen has many complaints so he decides to fly away? Or maybe he is complaining about not having parachute? Either way, the conceptual relation is too ambiguous like a surreal painting and is aesthetically pleasing to the eye.
