How we built the Album Cover Bank
Album Cover Bank in an archive of Nigerian album covers from 1950s to date. It currently has over 5,000 covers, and it provides a unique and comprehensive view of the evolution of Nigerian album art.
The project first began as an exploration of the relationship between graphic trends in Nigerian pop culture and their influence on Nigerian music throughout the years. However, during our desk research, we realized that the initial idea was broader than anticipated. After conducting multiple interviews, writing numerous essay drafts, and iterating the idea, we ultimately decided to narrow our focus to curating a database of Nigerian album cover art.
During our discovery phase we planned to talk to some popular album cover art printing companies that were active between the late ’70s through to the ’80s, to learn their process of creating these covers. Unfortunately, the two companies we set out to find (Ibukunola Printers and Ibukun Olu Art Production) simply did not exist anymore, and there was no way to trace them.
It was a sad discovery but it helped us develop our scope of choosing to preserve the work digitally so it doesn’t get lost in history like the physical space and many other things in Nigeria.
The process of curating the covers
We prioritized the task of identifying and acknowledging the designers for each album cover we curated because these designers play a crucial role in shaping the visual identity of a musical body of work.
Album art often serves as the the initial introduction to commercial music, yet cover artists don’t always receive due credit for their role in contributing to a musician’s project. We aimed to use the Album Cover Bank to rectify this by documenting the artistic contributions of cover designers and establishing a form of online portfolio where people can easily browse through a variety of album covers.
Eseosa Belo-Osagie curated the first set of covers with help from Jessica, and she set the guidelines for all the information about the covers we’ll be archiving. Over time, as the studio learned how to collaborate with individuals from diverse backgrounds, we hired Emmanuel, a Data Analyst, to populate the database and double-check that the information sitting on it was accurate.
Displaying the covers
Airtable was our preferred choice of tool for the database due to its versatile data storage functionality and extensive data display capabilities.
While it felt great to have over 5000 covers stored and displayed on the database, the Airtable website wasn’t intuitive or fun to browse through. It lacked informative content to guide visitors, and we were unable to track website activity effectively. Additionally, the filter and sort options that would help visitors narrow down their search to specific factors poised some usability challenges.
In management, there’s a common saying: “If you’re too busy to make it work, delegate it to someone who can", and that’s exactly what we did during a team stand-up in July ’22. Opemipo suggested hosting a contest for creatives to submit ideas on how we can make the database useful and fun to browse through. We made this decision because we were pre-occupied with other projects at the studio.
At that time, we already had a strong belief in the Nigerian creative community, so we posted a tweet to announce the contest. We wanted to select four winners so we could have a variety of ideas to work with. To our surprise, exactly four entries were submitted for the contest: three from writers and one from a designer. In the end, we decided to work with all four of them.
The three writers (Kemi, Immaculata, and Chukwudi) submitted pitches for an essay centered around the covers in the database, while Idris (the designer) presented a website prototype that allows users to browse their favourite album covers and stream the songs.
We set up a group call with the contestants to kick off the project. The outcome of the call was that we would support them with research and an operation plan to guide them on what the final outcome of their projects should look like.
As we progressed, we initially agreed to publish the essays on Idris’s website. However, upon reviewing each person’s project again and considering the purpose behind it, we realized that it would be better for each project to stand on its own due to the distinct and powerful narratives.
Tosin worked with the writers to edit their stories, while I paired up with Idris to explore and ideate how a user-friendly archive of album covers should function and appear.
You can read Immaculata’s essay here: Nigerian 1970s album covers reflected individual and national identities.
Design and Development
During the website ideation phase we decided to take out the streaming option Idris proposed in his prototype due to technical and legal limitations. We focused our efforts on creating a resonating brand identity and a fluid user experience that made it easy to navigate the website.
While designing the website, we were able to predict some technical limitations we were going to face with building it. Idris and I are both designers proficient in using low-code tools like Webflow to build simple websites. We both knew how to use Webflow to build the website’s interface, but we were not confident in our individual experience with custom code to connect the data on Airtable to the site.
I raised this concern with Ope, who proposed making the project open source and partnering with an engineer seeking to expand their portfolio. Given that the studio already allocated $2,000 for this project, we couldn’t afford to hire an engineer to build the website because we already made a strict budget to close out the rest of the projects we were working on for the season.
This led me to reach out to friends within my circle. Lina volunteered to work on it because it would have a real-life impact on people. Her only condition was that the site had to be visually appealing, and we certainly met her standards.
Lina collaborated with another friend; Toyosi to build the website from scratch using React, SCSS, GitHub and Airtable’s API Document.
Technical limitations with Airtable
Although Airtable was very efficient for organizing and displaying data, it probably wasn’t the best tool to use as a third-party database for a project of this magnitude. There were some challenges with how Airtable handled API calls; it processed only 100 data sets at a time, clearing each set before moving on to the next 100.
This was problematic for the project because it involved displaying a large amount of data, and Airtable couldn’t save or revisit the data it had already processed. Lina and I found this to be quite frustrating, so we reached out to Tomi, who has experience with using Airtable as a third-party database for building websites.
Tomi acknowledged that the amount of data we were trying to display might be too much for Airtable’s capabilities, so he suggested two different methods to address this:
- Pre-load all the data onto the site when it loads to avoid frequent API calls. However, this approach could slow down the site. Alternatively;
- Transfer the data to a simpler database like Google Sheets. The downside here is that we’d lose some of Airtable’s visual power on the database end.
Lina eventually figured out how to pre-load the data on the site without slowing down it’s speed, but it came at a cost of making numerous design changes to the site like: displaying the covers in an overlay screen and switching from pagination to an infinite scroll.
Ready for production; making final changes
Some time passed by, and when we were ready to make the final changes to the site that made the user experience smoother and push to production, Lina and Toyosi were already working on other projects and barely had anytime to make the changes.
I didn’t have the authority to demand that they make the changes, as it was, after all, an open-source project, and they were collaborating with the studio to build their portfolios. Ope reached out to Dike and he was happy to help make the final iterations on the site.
To manage the process, I had to compile a detailed list of required changes, providing context for each issue. Some of the significant changes we implemented on the website include:
- Transferring our hosting service from Netlify to Vercel due to the intuitive interface.
- Incorporating a Plausible script into the index page’s header code for better insights into our website traffic.
- Introducing a submission feature that empowers users to contribute their preferred covers to the site.
- Additionally, we have integrated a report button, allowing users to address any concerns about their intellectual property being featured on the platform.
Dike and I made all the necessary changes and published the site to a live link: www.albumcoverbank.com.
Things I learnt while working on this project
- Documentation is a lifesaver. We set out to build this project over a year ago, and I still vividly recall the entire process, all thanks to the act of thorough documentation.
- Iteration plays a significant role in design and development. Executing the exact initial idea can be challenging, which is why it’s essential to remain open to different options throughout the building process.
- It’s crucial to cultivate innovation. While working on the project, we encountered several obstacles. However, we successfully navigated through each one by employing creative solutions and persistence.
- How to understand people’s work styles and adapt my work ethic to align with my collaborators.
What the future of Album Cover Bank looks like
A significant source of inspiration for curating this archive of designers’ work comes from the Peoples Graphic Design Archive.
I envision the Album Cover Bank evolving into an online portfolio that prominently showcases the remarkable work of cover designers in Nigeria. The project is dedicated to preserving their artistic contributions, and we’re committed to refining our design and enhancing the website’s functionality with better engineering.
