F RMAT
Album art is a responsive medium. It responds to current formats it is placed upon and, therefore, has to be highly considered and appropriate in order for it to work effectively. Designers have faced many challenges over the years, from the free thinking innocence of the sixites and the start of experimentation for artists and album covers (which many people attribute to Peter Blakes Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club for the Beatles), right up to the present day of digital music. These days album art has to be even more adaptable to various formats as we reside in a new digital age of social media, not to mention the fact that Vinyl and CD are still here and not likely to go anywhere too soon. A more adventurous, creative and progressive approach towards album-art and music packaging in general is therefore needed as a response to the divergence and convergence of technologies and music. Innovations within these fields are now common place. Rob Jones for instance, in 2011 won a Grammy award for his packaging design (a new category since 1995) on The White Stripes ‘Under Great White Northern Lights’ box set.
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Stanley Donwood is another Grammy award winning artist, who has also contributed boundary pushing designs for Radiohead. In Rainbows and the more recent King of Limbs are notable exceptions, mainly due to the seemingly obtuse attitude about what should be considered album art at all. King of Limbs (limited edition), came packaged with a fictional Sunday newspaper, showing an increasing trend of ‘separation’ where the art breathes outside of the music packaging and lives in its own right. Donwood says of this: ‘Previously, the technology to record music has driven what the packaging is, but now that’s no longer relevant, you don’t really have to have the music in packaging at all. You could just make a whole bunch of art, and if you buy the music, you might want to buy the art’ (Williams, 2010).