The Evolution of Packaging
Let’s Face It: We Judge Albums by their Covers
A 50-year-old man died because he drank dish detergent, which looked like a glass of white wine. You’d think either the waiter or the man would have caught this, but the waiter found the detergent in a wine glass in the refrigerator and served it. The man received it in a wine glass and drank it. The container made the liquid look harmless. It short-circuited both their common senses.
Much like a container, packaging primes people for whatever they’re about to consume. Packaging, much like all other forms of branding, serves as a mental shortcut. Cover art can change someone’s perception of what they’re about to listen to or read, for better or worse. Based on their opinion of your cover art, critics and potential listeners take it more (or less) seriously.
More importantly, people connect over covers. Back in the day, when interviews and photos weren’t nearly as accessible as they are now, record and CD covers were the only medium through which artists could communicate their intentions and inspirations to their listeners. Even today, people connect with each other over album (and book) covers. That type of serendipity could also influence the listening experience.
Whether you’re making music, writing, or filming, think about how you package your work.
If you’ve put your life into your art, make sure you invest attention and resources in the way you package and present it. It only gets one chance to make a first impression.
Everyone is told not to judge books by their covers, only because we naturally, and inevitably, do. We use this symbol to gauge the potential quality of a piece of art. Beautiful packaging suggests to the consumer that the product underneath it is equally as stellar.
Here are some things to look for when you’re creating your packaging.
Recognizable On All Surfaces
Cover art used to make certain products stand out in record stores. In today’s age, where nearly every song is accessible and sorted through interfaces like iTunes and Spotify, visuals play a huge role in discovery again.
Collections are so large that even with filters, our eyes naturally wander to covers that catch our attention. (It’s similar to copywriter Neville Medhora’s idea of the Big Fucking Button.) Ironically, in order for people to discover your music on one of these stores, they have to see it first.
By the way, they could be seeing the cover art anywhere. Make your cover art outstanding by keeping it consistent. Kanye West caught on to this a few years ago with his GOOD Friday series of free releases, where he went with a consistent black and red color scheme with bold fonts.
West has taken it to an even more minimalist level now. His creative agency, DONDA, designs all their clients’ covers with a focus on iconic imagery, and typically no words.
Whether it’s sized down to 250 x 250 or up to 1,000 x 1,000, the cover art scales beautifully. It’s important for the potential listener, because it might not be their first time seeing the cover art. Once they see it again, it prompts their curiosity. Maybe their friend posted your cover art on Instagram. Maybe they saw it on a curator like Hype Machine but didn’t get a chance to listen to it. Iconic imagery has a greater chance of staying in a viewer’s mind.
On a different medium, notice how Seth Godin’s book cover doesn’t have any words.
Notice how the A Book Apart series of paperbacks and ebooks have huge words and simple color schemes, so it’s easy to read no matter what size the cover is.
Let’s not forget Drake’s recent cover art for If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late, which you can read comfortably on your little iPod Nano screen or on an actual CD cover. Size matters! Make sure it’s easily consumed, and appreciated, across different media.
He even has the nice little “6 God” emblem at the bottom, which can be used for Twitter profiles or any other branding (e.g., concert tours, merch, etc.).
Better yet, once your music is published on a platform, you might gain control to update cover art as you see fit. Publisher Craig Mod writes about how he updated covers of existing books to promote new products.
Cover Art as Sensational Promotion
In an ideal world, reviewers, journalists, and bloggers would focus on the quality and merit of the actual music or book. Unfortunately, we live in an age where pageviews take priority, and controversy and sensationalism are rewarded with greater ad dollars. Even if you can’t get a journalist’s attention with your music, you might be able to get their attention with your cover art.
For example, here’s Future’s DS2 cover art.
The colors splashed on top of a white background makes a strong impression. Once again, iconic imagery was the priority. Interestingly enough, that the same graphic was published on a chemistry book cover.
Whether Future and his creative team were aware of it or not, blogs and publications exploited this piece of news. That’s not to say Future, one of the most relevant rappers at the time of writing, needed the extra coverage. Whether it was intentional or not, it extended his narrative. He appeared in the media cycle twice — first with the announcement of his album, and then second with the unusual story about his cover.
In a similar way, your cover art can serve as part of a press push. You can also do your graphic designer a favor, much like how the Slovenian artist who supplied part of Future’s cover art got covered when the press found out about the textbook.
Since Future’s graphic designer bought the image from the artist through stock photo company Shutterstock, it also was a part of Future’s cover art story. This could make for an interesting partnership between newer musicians (on tight visual budgets) and stock photography companies (some of them might like the exposure).
You could also take a more technology-heavy route and integrate your cover art into your social media strategy. For example, Common empowered fans to upload their own photos to the cover art for his album Nobody’s Smiling. This is also applicable beyond music — the site Straight Outta Somewhere serves as the film Straight Outta Compton’s meme-generator. Pretty simple stuff, yet a wide-reaching distribution for the film and for Beats by Dre.
Communicate Across Different Senses
Cover art used to be important for another reason. It would be the only way that artists could connect with their listeners outside of the music. Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell, one half of art design group Hipgnosis, says in an interview with London Grip:
In those days album covers were very important to the person who bought them, because there wasn’t MTV, there weren’t music videos, there wasn’t the saturation of Youtube or any other available source to learn about your favourite rock n roll star. So an album was very important. You’d buy an album and scour the cover while playing it, looking for clues as to what made those artists tick. We latched onto that early on, by including lyrics, by including postcards, posters and little clues.
Today, artists have way more mediums they can make use of. Obviously, there’s TV and radio interviews. But there’s also online video, text, websites, mobile apps, USB drives, and a ton of other mediums. There are so many other ways to occupy a listener’s or reader’s senses. The artists that explore (and exploit) this will gain more people’s attention.
Childish Gambino was on to something when he did a screenplay and short film for his album Because the Internet. For example, he released a short film entitled Clapping for the Wrong Reasons a few months prior to his album launch. (Here’s a comprehensive dive into the transmedia album launch. He eventually took the screenplay down, but here’s a PDF copy and video clips.)
Childish Gambino also buried some secret pages and songs in the code of his website, which takes his album’s whole “Internet” theme and message to a deeper level.
He even got creative with the lyric video for “3005,” featuring Abella Anderson who acted in his short film. (Let’s also not overlook when things are packaged in such an amateur, yet authentic, way they’re actually kind of endearing and remarkable, like Bangs’s entertaining music videos.)
Launching your work across different media provides your fans with a chance for total immersion. You communicate across visual and auditory senses. At a show or other live event, it could even be tactile. This is the next level of packaging. (Although you could potentially argue that the different forms of media are different aspects of the product, I’d still suggest that your music or book is the core product, and the rest are extensions at best. Unless you’re making something like Fantasia.)
The World is Hungry
One day when you get popular, your cover art could become so catchy that they’ll perpetuate into mainstream culture. For example, Drake’s handwriting-based font on If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late is everywhere now. Someone made a website based on his Nothing Was the Same cover art. Obviously, your music or writing has to be great too.
You spend your life creating art. Cheaping out on the packaging only ruins people’s perception of your art. Spend time, energy, and money on packaging. It’s an investment in your art, and it will be another way for you to talk to your fans, patrons, and consumers. Even from a pure marketing standpoint, your packaging is another chance to stand out. Don’t waste it.
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Herbert Lui helps business and brands telling compelling stories through content at his marketing agency, Wonder Shuttle. His work has appeared in HYPEBEAST, Complex, and The FADER. He writes a newsletter that explores media, information, and marketing.
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