ACHOF presents the Art on My Sleeves series – Episode 1 – All Nerve: Album Cover Graphic Design

All Nerve Record Cover Collage by Jules Seamer

Posted January 14th, 2022, with an update posted January 18th, 2022

Highlights from the original exhibition curated by Jules Seamer, with text edited/updated by the Album Cover Hall of Fame’s Mike Goldstein

#1 in the Art on My Sleeves series – All Nerve: Album Cover Graphic Design – In addition to the musical and business aspirations that have inspired individuals and record labels to produce packaged music products for sale to fans worldwide, the album cover art projects associated with these records have benefitted over the years from the talents of the people who’ve worked on them, the tools they had available to create “just the right” cover image and the dynamics of what constituted “Popular Culture” at the time they were created.

The use of Graphic Design – or “Commercial Art”, as it was once called – on album covers was brought about due to the successful efforts of several early pioneers, the most notable being commercial artists including Alex Steinweiss who, in 1938, became the first art director for Columbia Records and, in 1940, Introduced first individually-designed record cover (Smash Song Hits by Rodgers & Hart) and went on to pioneer cardboard sleeve-based packaging for 33-1/3 RPM LPs in 1948. He was joined at Columbia by Jim Flora and Robert M. “Bob” Jones in the mid-1940s (followed by Saul Bass, S. Neil Fujita and Bob Cato) while, over at the jazz labels Verve, Blue Note and others, talented artists including David Stone Martin, Reid Miles and Andy Warhol produced covers that brought them fame thanks to their iconic design work. Whether helping to shape the vision of a label, as Barney Bubbles did at Stiff, Vaughan Oliver did at 4AD or Peter Saville crafted for Factory or establishing a style that became synonymous with the bands they had as clients (like Hipgnosis for Pink Floyd or Jamie Reid for the Sex Pistols), album cover graphic designers were deservedly hailed for creating mini-masterpieces that made an art form out of the album cover.

Album Cover Hall of Fame News Update and Link Summary for December, 2021

Posted December 1, 2021 by Mike Goldstein, AlbumCoverHallofFame.com

Season’s Greetings and Happy Post-Black-Friday-Cyber-Monday cool-off period to you all. The last month has surely been both a joy (being able to see certain family members and friends in person) and a challenge as we enter the Holiday season having to deal with new derivations of COVID, the availability (or lack thereof) of some of the things we wanted to give (or get) as gifts and the general sense of “who knows what’s next” we’re all faced with, so it is with great pleasure that I’m dedicating this month’s ACHOF news summary to the delivery of interesting stories about your favorite album package image-makers both here in the U.S. and around the world.

The people responsible for packaging your favorite music products continue to astound (although, in some cases, confound) us with the results of their efforts, so this month’s edition of the ACHOF News Update and Summary includes a number of great examples of album cover artist/art news – the kind of updates you’ve come to expect in these monthly summaries.  Leading off in the news department are stories about the nominees (and, in one case, inductees) in several significant album cover art-related annual polls, including those for The Grammy Awards, the Making Vinyl Packaging Awards, the Best Art Vinyl Awards and, my favorite, the Album Cover Hall of Fame. You’ll find this info in its own separate section, below.