7 cover stories in our archive
Behind the Covers' archive includes 7 album covers documented under the "graphic design" design theme, spanning the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s. These covers sit within the hip-hop, rock, electronic, alternative, punk, blues, folk tradition and feature work by The Notorious B.I.G., Talking Heads, Joy Division, The Clash 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.
A bare-skinned baby with a towering afro sits alone on white, and for 17 years nobody knew who he was. The mystery child on The Notorious B.I.G.'s 1994 debut was paid $150 for a two-hour shoot, and his face became one of hip-hop's most argued-over images.
Tibor Kalman's design obscures the band members' faces with red-tinted blocks, reflecting the album's themes of dissolving individual identity — influenced by Afrobeat, Brian Eno's theories, and West African polyrhythmic music.
A blizzard of white lines on a black field, this 1979 debut carries no band name, no title, nothing. The shape is actually a stack of radio pulses from the first pulsar ever found, and the man who plotted them had no idea his data had become one of rock's most copied images.
On 21 September 1979, a frustrated Paul Simonon swung his Fender bass at the floor of New York's Palladium, and Pennie Smith caught it. She thought the shot too blurry to use. Joe Strummer pointed at the contact sheet and said: 'That one.'
Peter Corriston spent weeks combing New York for the perfect tenement, then cropped out an entire floor so the buildings would fit a square sleeve. The windows of 96-98 St. Mark's Place became die-cut peepholes that could spell out a name and reveal everyone from Buzz Aldrin to Lee Harvey Oswald.
A keyboardist asked for something as classy as a chocolate box. What he got was a beam of white light splitting into a rainbow against pure black, a design pulled from a 1963 physics textbook that would end up on more T-shirts than almost any image in rock. Here's how Pink Floyd's prism came to be.
A blue lattice of diamond windows floats in space, doves drifting through cloud and shadow, half-glimpsed faces trapped behind the holes. Mike McInnerney built The Who's Tommy as a puzzle you have to pass through to reach the music: a visual riddle drawn straight from a teaching that life is 'an illusion within an illusion.'