MY MY MY

As far as I can tell, every classical music album comes with terrible packaging design as standard. A mix of horrendous typography, accompanied by generic photographs of instruments, composers, or in the worst cases, both. These are some of the most amazing, most celebrated pieces of music ever made, so why don’t they deserve good design?

Don’t even get me started on the many problems I have with this album cover:

Perhaps it’s simply that the record companies want to keep the album art ‘refined’ and ’sophisticated’ in order to differentiate it from the other music found on the shelves of record shops, or increasingly on the pages of internet shops like Amazon. Just glancing at the covers, you can instantly tell that these are classical albums; they’re certainly not rock, dance, pop music, or anything else. However, album covers that are trying to look too sophisticated and pretentious run the risk of deterring new listeners. I don’t know anybody my own age would even consider buying a classical album, yet I’m willing to bet that it’s not because of the music itself, it’s because the packaging makes it look like you’re only supposed to purchase it if you’re past retirement age.

Upon seeing all these vexatious examples of bad design, I soon found myself eagerly trying to search out some examples of good classical album covers. I found a very interesting Flickr set full of classical music albums, all on vinyl, from the 1950s. The covers are full of bold colours and shapes, and some delightful illustrations which really sum up the style of design at the time. It’s very far removed from the kind of illustrations we are used to seeing on album covers today.

So if classical albums came with good design in the 50s, at what point did it all start to go wrong? I took Gustav Holst’s ‘The Planets’ as an example, and started looking at how the album covers have changed over the last half a century.

1960s

1970s

1990s

2000s

In my opinion the 50s is still the best example, but the one that intrigues me the most is the one from the 70s. Even if it’s not a great album cover, it’s great to see at least one example that steers clear of the all too obvious pictures of planets, and instead tries to approach the subject of outer-space and otherworldliness from a different angle.

Finally, I did manage to find one example of a classical music album that I thought had a great design. Die Götterdämmerung (The Twilight of the Gods), part of Wagner’s opera, which culminates with the apocalyptical ending of the earth by raging fires and then floods, which wipe out both human civilization and the Gods. It would have been all too easy for the designer to simply place a picture of fire, destruction, Gods, or similar imagery on the front, but instead they went for a clean layout with a good visual hierarchy, a clever image, and some good typography to match (the only negative aspect is the record company’s insistence on putting their logo in the corner). I’d like to see more covers like this, and fewer pictures of dusty old composers and their violins.

For further examples of good, bad, and some slightly ridiculous classical album art, see these articles on the allmusic blog and the Too Many Tristans blog.