Book cover designs of the mid-2020s

I was walking around my local Dymocks this morning, not looking for anything in particular, and thinking how much goes into book cover design these days. Not just the actual design, but the printing too – spot varnish, holograms, embossing and gold leaf weren't all that common in past decades. Here are a few that stood out to me. Although, will I look back on these in 20 years' time and think, "That looks so mid-2020s!"?

Let's Find Out.

You would expect a book about the moon to have a picture of the moon on the cover, right? That's No-Brainer Book Design 101. But the moon is just...a nondescript grey ball. Sorry, but it is. Don't get me wrong, the moon is a wonderful thing. In fact my niece always looks for it in the night sky and I've started giving it more attention than I used to. And this vivid colour treatment used here is pretty dynamic, with its high contrast and sense of gentle rotation and motion. Also, it's a good book, from what I read flicking through it.

A travel book that avoid the usual clichés, instead going for more abstract imagery and vivid colours. Bold typography and spot varnish on this larger-than-A4 hardcover book.

m    i    n    i    m    a     l     i     s     m

I like this one, with its bold orange (or "satsuma" if you will [no]) contrasted by the dark background, with the Eurostile typeface prominent. The only thing I don't like is the extraneous text, and this is far from the only example. Does "The number one bestselling author" really need to be there? Number one where? And when? And which? And also, "A novel" written under the title. Thanks for that, mate. I thought it was a board game, but thanks for setting me straight.

Old-style/vintage typefaces and iconography always score high with me! It's a crappy photo, but you get the idea. For some reason this treatment always works well when there's a character's name in the book's title. "Glorious Revenge" on its own just wouldn't cut it. Don't ask me why. More extraneous text here: I'm also not a fan of pull quotes cluttering up the front cover. No, I'm not particularly interested about what the Sydney Morning Herald had to say about this book. Leave me alone.

As a fan of The KLF and their bizarre antics in the world of late '80s–early '90s house music, I actually want to get this book! But, you know, times are tough. But the design uses the same Compacta Black typeface used on The KLF's cover art, and the lurid pink and yellow is redolent of Never Mind The Bollocks, so that's a plus point too. And the sheep. And just so you know, yes, they actually did burn a million pounds. More power to them.

A simple gold leaf overlay of a dinosaur skull, and simple sans serif typographic layout in a tasteful orang-utan green. The top half isn't actually dark, I just took the photo like that to emphasize the gold lettering. Not that I had much time to set up the shot in a crowded bookstore.

Not the best photo, but hopefully you can see the hologram effect on the book title and other design elements on the cover. Some designs overdo holograms but this one is understated and quite effective. It actually makes me want to learn more about phosphorescence. Well, no it doesn't. I can take it or leave it. But opposite this was a book called "Taylor Swift and the clothes she wears". Zzz. I know which one I'd rather read.

Depending on how long these books stay in print, it's fair to say that these cover designs will not be permanent. Unlike record covers that stay the same regardless of how long the album is in print, book designs are regularly updated and re-designed. (Why is this, I wonder? Can anyone tell me? Hello? Planet Earth, can you hear me calling...)

So, what did I draw in 2023?

I'm back! I'm sure you expected more than three measly blog posts from me in 2023. What can I say, drawing, colouring and printing a 128-page colour graphic novel took up a good chunk of my time. Here's what the front cover looks like:

And in this artistic yearly wrap-up, here are some of my other drawings from 2023, in chronological order. 

 

Violet, a character from my 2020 graphic novel The Snarley, riding a bike in a rural setting. Exercise in drawing characters not seen in their usual environments.

A frog craftsman in his workshop.

Mona Lisa, an Indian film actress. She appears in my unreleased graphic novel Limelight from 2021.

Wonka in Picasso style.

A Roman emperor with a metal detector.

Steam locomotive.

Feather, a character who appeared in Airbury Academy and Limelight, among other things.

Fremantle sheds.

Watercolour drawing of a frog. That's a bowl of nachos in his hand, if you can't tell.

Watercolour tanuki, inspired by Studio Ghibli's Heisei Tanuki Gassen Ponpoko. This is, of course, the 'Reiwa' version.

Tintin and Juliet Prime investigate the 'poison of madness'. This year was 40 years since the death of Hergé.

Spike and Violet in a Norman Rockwell parody.

Juliet and friends going carolling. I was going to write some lyrics above Seymour's head, but I couldn't be bothered. Now, get lost!

My top ten favourite album covers

Everyone else seems to be doing this at the moment (on Facebook mostly), so here I am to chip in with my 2 guilders' worth. In this boneheaded era of music streaming, album cover art probably seems fairly inconsequential or extraneous. But rest assured, there was a time when it was an all-powerful tool of music marketing (see the satirical cover of XTC's album Go 2 for further details on this), and not just a nicely-posed photo of the artist to make the record look good in-store. 

As such, there are certain album covers whose imagery stays with you, and cements itself with the musical content of the album in your mind, so that visual and audio become one. Much like that famous cover photo of four drugged-out hippie twits crossing a road in London, it is the first thing your brain provides to you when the album title or any of its songs are mentioned.

Here are ten such album covers that stand out for me. They were all released between 1988 and 1994. (Draw your own conclusions. If that conclusion is "No decent album covers were made after 1994", well, I won't argue with you).

Number 10
Throwing Copper
LIVE
1994

My enduring memory of this album is listening to it on the bus on the way to uni in my first year, when I didn't have a car. I didn't have the cover art on my taped copy, but I was familiar with it anyway; how it incorporates a gloomy painting titled Sisters Of Mercy by Peter Howson. The painting, depicting four glum 'working girls' walking a proselytizer off a cliff, was auctioned off in 2005 for 186 grand and now is part of some millionaire's trophy cabinet. Whatever. Like many bands who use a painting by a third party as their album cover, I am not sure what prompted the decision to use it, but despite the attire of the figures in it, it seems to evoke a bygone era and oddly seems to fit with the anthemic and powerful rock sounds and mystical lyrics as well. The significance of the album title eludes me though, as that phrase does not appear in the lyrics of any song.

Number 9
Hot Dogma
TISM
1990

For their second album, This Is Serious Mum commissioned an illustration of Chinese Red Guards in propaganda poster style. All the song titles on the back are written in Chinese, right to left of course, and the Chinese text on the cover translates as "The unification of the proletariat under the banner of TISM". You'd think TISM wouldn't list the proper titles in English at all anywhere on the package — like they did later with the Machiavelli And The Four Seasons album — but they do actually give you the titles here. There is no credited artist for the album cover, but knowing TISM, the artist's name probably is there and listed under something else. You never know with these guys. The liner notes are credited to 'E.J. Whitten', after all. I like the overall treatment here — much like the way the Butthole Surfers' album Hairway To Steven used weird cartoons to represent each song instead of actual song titles.

Number 8
Nonsvch
XTC
1992

Andy Partridge selected the title for his band's 12th album after seeing a drawing of the former Nonsuch Palace in Surrey, which was drawn in 1610 by cartographer John Speed (see the full map here – look in the top right corner). "(Non[e]such) is a very beautiful word," Partridge said. "It was the most marvellous castle ever, covered with gold, sculptures and paints. It was built by that tyrant, Henry VIII, who razed a village for it." John Speed's drawing — the title 'Nonsvch' in his own lettering is retained on the cover — is complemented nicely by the medieval-style lettering on the back cover, where each song on the album has its own illustration, chapbook-style. The whole visual design evokes 17th century art and typography: too bad it has been consistently ruined by mediocre reissues. It deserves much better.

 

Number 7
Zooropa
U2
1993

I don't know what to say about this cover for U2's 8th album. But just look at it! You can tell it was made at the time when rad computer graphics were becoming more prevalent (and hitting critical mass in 1995-96). The disjointed, experimental pop muzak on the record needed a similarly tech-heavy visual treatment (done by Brian Williams). So here we have nine images in a 3x3 grid of TV images, including one of Lenin and one of Mussolini, overlaid with distorted purple text, showing the partial song titles "Wake Up Dead Man", "Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me", and "If You Wear That Velvet Dress", all ultimately withheld from Zooropa. On top of all that are twelve digitally drawn yellow stars from the European flag, with an 'astro-baby' in the centre. The whole thing was meant to depict a Soviet cosmonaut floating in orbit after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Did 15 year old me think of any of this when I bought the album? Nah. Although I do remember thinking "Hey, the CD tray is see-through" (they had always been black up until that point. Also, the CD booklet is notoriously difficult to slide into the jewel case, such is the volume of oversaturated images it contains.

Number 6
Apollo 18
THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS
1992

The provenance of this cover art was until recently a mystery to me. As a graphic design student I once wrote an analysis of this image, and was unable to cite the credited artist as anything other than Rolf Conant, which is a pseudonym for band member John Flansburgh. As you may have worked out from the album title, Apollo 18 has several songs with a space theme, and as it turns out, while the band were searching the NASA archives for graphics, they were selected by NASA as Musical Ambassadors for International Space Year. Flansburgh didn't paint the sperm whale and squid himself though. He nicked it from an issue of Fate, a pulp magazine dedicated to the paranormal, from August 1958.

Number 5
Pump
AEROSMITH
1989

This was the first album I owned. I received it on cassette for my 12th birthday. Ten tracks of headbangin' late '80s hard rock as served up by Boston's most enduring hell-raisers. So what's with this cover photo (by that famous artist, American Stock Photography) of an old International Harvester truck, with a smaller identical truck rear-mounting it? Is this some bizarre sexual reference? How did they happen on a stock photo in that 'pose'? And if you look closely you can see "F.I.N.E.", the title of one of the songs, on the side of both trucks in chrome. And then the album is called Pump. What's that all about? I can only assume that someone in the band thought it would be funny. As a result, the entire album feels like it is soaked in petrol.

Number 4
Parklife
BLUR
1994

The archetypal Britpop album detailing, as frontman Damon Albarn put it "The travels of the mystical lager-eater", needed a similarly typically British image as its cover. Food Records boss David Balfe thought that image should be a fruit and vegetable cart, with the album title London. 'Cause art can only get better when the suits get involved, right? The enduring shot of two greyhounds racing (the uncropped photo in the CD booklet shows a third dog, out of focus and cropped out) was the one chosen to embody the lager-and-betting shop lifestyle, taken by sports photographer Bob Thomas (who couldn't believe a band wanted it for an album cover) in 1988. One glance at those greyhounds and you know which album you're dealing with. "Southern England personified", as Oasis' Noel Gallagher put it, and that's right on the money.

Number 3
Nevermind
NIRVANA
1991

This must be a mistake, right? My favourite album of all time, the most iconic album cover of the 1990s, was not number 1 in this list? Well, yes actually. The story of how this cover image came to be is well documented. Kurt Cobain wanted an image that would represent his naive young indie band making their major-label debut and chasing the big bucks that record deal would entail. Except that's a lie, and what really happened is when Kurt shared an apartment with drummer Dave Grohl, they were sitting up one night watching a documentary about underwater births and they thought it would make, as Kurt put it, "a really neat image". He had by then scrapped his idea of calling the album Sheep and decided to use the baby photo as the album cover, adding the fish hook and dollar bill. A stock photo sourced by the label proved too expensive to use, so photographer Kirk Weddle took the photo at a kids' swimming pool. There is a snippet of footage in the video for "Come As You Are" that replicates the cover image, and that song's opening guitar riff echoes the watery theme of the cover art.

Number 2
Lincoln
THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS
1988

The cover of the band's second album, named after John Linnell and John Flansburgh's hometown in Massachusetts (Lincoln Calling was the original title), depicts a secular whimsical shrine built by Brian Dewan. He wanted to have Flansburgh and Linnell themselves in the framed portraits behind the podiums, but according to Flansburgh, "The general on the right side of the cover is my grandfather, and the man with the beard is John Linnell's great-grandfather. We felt funny putting our faces on it, so instead we put the faces of our ancestors on it. It's got this churchlike quality to it, so there's something reverent about it, and then something very twisted about it." 
Twisted indeed. The closer you look, the more questions you have. What are the clocks for? Why do they have thirteen hour markers on them? Why are the mics wired up? Is there going to be a press conference? Why is there no band name or album title on the cover? What is this thing just sitting in a field? Good art always provokes more questions than it answers.

Number 1
The Real Thing
FAITH NO MORE
1989

You might be looking at this thinking: really? This is his top choice? Well, let me explain. This was one of the very first albums I owned (third actually, after Pump and Technotronic's Pump Up The Jam). I still have the cassette. I know every song, every lyric, every funk-metal riff, every drum thrash, every wailing vocal on here, and all of it, every single bit of it, I associate with this image — which I can only describe as an upside-down shot of a cracked riverbed and a blood red sky, sun emerging from the clouds and three flames inside a splashing droplet of milk. As to what it symbolizes, you'll have to work that out yourself. I can't help you there. 

There is no credited artist on this album cover because it was designed by someone at Slash Records and assigned to the album without the band's creative input. It does however feature Harold Edgerton's famous milk droplet photo from 1937, titled 'Milk Drop Coronet'.

Cheer Up, Charlie

Hi everyone! No, I haven't given up on this blog. I'll continue updating it with the same posts as on the Tumblr page. Here's my tribute to the January 14, 2015 issue of Charlie Hebdo's cover art, the first following the attacks on their staff. Cartoonists forever, and all that!

For those who don't know, "Cheer Up, Charlie" is the name of a song from the 1971 film Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory. What?

Lino Carving: Airbury Logo

I'm gearing up towards the possibility of getting Airbury IV printed, so the cover art has to look decent. After showing the rough version around it became apparent that the logo or header needed to be improved. The rigorous precision of the words "Airbury Academy" in the Trajan Pro typeface looked nice, but didn't really stand out. And if anything has to stand out, it's the title, right?

So the other day I got this small piece of lino I'd had since my TAFE days and transferred the header onto it in reverse, then used my lino-carving tools to carve the lettering in relief.

Using black ink and a roller, I made a few prints onto cartridge paper. Each print was different, with its own 'character'. It gave a pleasingly rustic and handmade look, as befitting the titular Academy which started in the 16th century. The pages above were scanned and a comp image was made...

And dropped into Photoshop, the end result being quite satisfying. Maya will feature on the cover for Volume IV, holding a snowball, or rather a snowman's head with carrot attached. More news on the possibility of the book will be coming soon!

Safari! Still More Album Artwork

Thanks for hanging in there while my Mac hangs in there. We'll continue to fight the good fight, and so on. To all of you who checked out Mini Epics, many thanks. There will be more. Well, even though my computer isn't in the best of health, the work must go on and finally China 5's 6th album is complete! It's called Safari and here is the recently-completed cover art:

Sometime during July the physical CD will be put together and then I can post a photo of what it looks like. Below is the rough sketch for the cover illustration which I drew in America on Christmas Eve last year.

And I'd like to return a shout out to my friend Sharna in England – thanks Shaz! It's the first time I've been mentioned on Twitter...that I know of.

New Album Artwork

It's been a while since the last post, and there have been plenty of projects on the burner. But here is some almost-finished album artwork for two upcoming China 5 releases. The first is a CD called Galaxies, which features 15 songs taken from the band's early years, with their music re-sourced from digital recordings (as opposed to cassette) and the vocals re-recorded, with two old songs completely re-recorded. Sound cool? Well, it is. And it will.

Above is the artwork for it; the red 'X' refers to the Roman number 10, since it's for the band's 10th anniversary. I try to avoid the use of stock photography when possible, but I must admit that on this occasion I wasn't able to go into space to take a galaxy photo myself. What can I say, I had other things to do.

If hearing 15 old China 5 songs in brand-new crystal clear sound isn't enough for you, then there's also a new EP with some 'weird stuff' on it. It still needs a title, which explains why there is no title yet on the above artwork. Perhaps we'll stick the title on the skull's forehead. Perhaps the skull might be removed altogether. Who knows? Hard to say in this universe.

Since this blog is only about artwork, you might want to check out this corresponding post on the China 5 Blog if you wanna know more about the actual songs.

You still here?

Nirvana's "Nevermind": 20th Anniversary

Today is the 20th anniversary of the release of Nirvana's landmark second album Nevermind, and I have just come back from the store with my copy of the 40-track 2CD deluxe edition. Even though I missed out on getting the worldwide limited edition with all those extra things, this version, with the full remastered album, studio demos, B-sides and live tracks, is still a worthy purchase. Rest assured that I cranked the album up to full volume when I got home! And it hasn't lost one bit of punch after 20 years – it was and still is my favourite album of all time.

UPDATE – Oct. 13: I just noticed something.


Seen above are the two ultra-deluxe versions of the 20th anniversary edition I found yesterday (and no, I didn't get to buy them). On the right is the vinyl release, comprising four LPs, and on the left is the ultrasupermega-deluxe-not even Butch Vig himself could get a copy of this-version, with outer slipcase, glass (?) cover and photo book ($165). Both have the same music content, but the cover of the vinyl version has something that the ultrasupermegadeluxe version, the double CD version and the remastered single CD version don't have.

Take a look at the cover below. See it yet?

It's kind of hard to see with that lens flare, but I got a close-up. The one-dollar bill in the original photo has been changed to a $20!

Ides Of March

Beware the Ides of March! That being today, of course.

Here's the cover art for the China 5 single "State Of Flux". This was the first track recorded for the 2010 Quarantine album, way back in September 2009. It's a digital-only single release, coupled with three other tracks: "Enthusiasm", a leftover song from 2004; "Pete's Song", one of the Quarantine outtakes; and the 'rock version' of "State Of Flux", recorded with actual electric guitar and drums only a week ago! (Hey, when you feel like recording cheap n' shoddy 'alternate versions' of existing tracks, you just go for it.)

I was supposed to be making a video for this song while I was in Sydney, but in the end I couldn't be bothered bringing the video camera. Tell you what, when the Youtube view count for the "Spank The Eighties" video hits 200 (it's currently 143), then I'll make one. But enough of that, here's the artwork.

Well, I told you to beware!

Quarantine

Thanks go out to Chris at CKGD, fellow designer and friend for his review of the Quarantine album. You can read it on his blog here.

Chris was kind enough to allow his artwork which he did for an unrelated CD artwork project to be used for the 4th China 5 album Republic in 2008.

© CKGD 2008

As mentioned before only two new songs have been uploaded so far but there will be more to come. I also received this comment from Ian Roure in New York City. Ian is the singer and guitarist in a great band called The Larch.

"Hey Pete – congrats on finishing the CD! "I particularly like 'Too Many Sushi'."

Thanks Ian! Speaking of that song – I was thinking of submitting it to that Snow-something-or-other competition where the best song sent in gets a video professionally shot, but never did in the end. I'll be keeping an eye out for the winning song though! I hope to plan and shoot a video for "Too Many Sushi" this summer. Wanna be in it?