5 cover stories in our archive
Behind the Covers' archive includes 5 album covers documented under the "color field" design theme, spanning the 1960s, 1990s, 2010s. These covers sit within the r&b, hip-hop, pop, alternative, folk tradition and feature work by Frank Ocean, Kanye West, Nirvana, The Beach Boys and others. 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.
Frank Ocean's Channel Orange features one of the most deceptively simple covers of the 2010s - a pure orange rectangle with no text. The minimalist design was Ocean's own concept, rejecting traditional album artwork conventions to create something that felt more like a color swatch than a music package.
A blazing red square hides a secret behind a wall of pixels: George Condo's phoenix painting, deliberately built by Kanye West to get banned. The story of how a nude monster with a polka-dot tail and no arms sparked a retail war and a Nirvana comparison.
A four-month-old baby swims naked toward a dollar bill on a fishhook, and decades later that baby would sue the band. The story behind Nirvana's 1991 cover runs from a TV program on water births to a censorship fight Kurt Cobain won with a single outrageous sentence.
Five Beach Boys, an enclosure full of hungry goats, and a title taken so literally it got the band reportedly banned from the San Diego Zoo. The Pet Sounds cover is a pun made flesh, and the sixth member couldn't even be in the photo.
A freezing February afternoon in Greenwich Village, a young couple walking arm-in-arm down a slushy street, and a photographer who admitted he had no real plan. The shot that resulted rewrote what an album cover could be. But the woman beside Bob Dylan was never named, and four songs vanished from the record just before it shipped.