3 cover stories in our archive
Behind the Covers' archive includes 3 album covers documented under the "anniversary" design theme, spanning the 1990s, 2000s. These covers sit within the r&b, pop, hip-hop, alternative, rock tradition and feature work by Beyoncé, Eve, Ben Folds Five. Each entry below includes the cover artwork, the designers and photographers behind it, and a short story about the visual choices that defined the release.
B'Day presents Beyoncé at the moment she was deliberately reshaping her solo image. Photographer Max Vadukul and art director Fuko Chubachi built the sleeve around a Southern, cinematic world of high hair, gold tones and controlled glamour, while Beyoncé herself chose the final portrait that became the album's defining image.
Eve's Scorpion cover refuses to settle on a single portrait. Three views of the rapper — a direct gaze, a side profile and an enlarged eye — overlap in a cool, metallic composition that turns her face into the album's entire visual language. Nitin Vadukul photographed Eve, while Barry Celestine, Charles 'Sleep' Duffy, Denise Trotman and Drew Fitzgerald handled art direction and design for the 2001 release.
Ben Folds Five's debut looks less like a polished major-label campaign than something assembled around a piano: snapshots, handwritten marks and the instrument that made a guitarless trio such an anomaly in 1995 alternative rock. Alexandria Searls is credited for the album's photography. Thirty years later, the cover has fresh relevance as the band reunites around an expanded anniversary edition built from a long-lost first attempt at the record.