21 cover stories in our archive
Behind the Covers' archive includes 21 album covers documented under the "graphic design" design theme, spanning the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2010s, 2020s. These covers sit within the indie, rock, hip-hop, alternative, punk, jazz, electronic, metal, blues, folk, country, reggae tradition and feature work by Bad Bunny, David Bowie, Kanye West, Radiohead 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 heartbroken cartoon heart with one swollen eye stands alone on a golden dune while dolphins leap over a candy-pink sky. It became the year's best-selling album. The strange, tender story of how Bad Bunny's drawing turned into Un Verano Sin Ti.
David Bowie's final album cover shows no face, only a solid black star and a row of broken fragments. Designer Jonathan Barnbrook built it around mortality, hidden fields of stars, and a secret spelled out beneath the symbol. Bowie died two days after its release.
Kanye West sold one of 2013's most talked-about albums in a clear plastic case with a single piece of red tape slapped on it. There was no cover, on purpose. One collaborator called it an 'open casket' for the dying CD. Behind that emptiness sat a discarded George Condo painting, a scrapped title, and a charge of theft.
A bleached-bone highway interchange dissolves into white fog, scrawled over with stick figures, the words 'Lost Child,' and a stolen airplane safety card. Radiohead's Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood built this 1997 collage on a brand-new Mac with one strict rule: no undo key, ever.
A man in dark sunglasses leans out a diner window clutching a phone, frozen in a 1964 photograph that Esquire never printed. Bruce Davidson shot it, forgot it, and thirty years later the Beastie Boys pulled it into daylight for an album about hip-hop, punk, jazz and funk crashing together.
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.
Two members of Run-DMC lean against a window in matching leather, the whole frame washed in violet and acid green. There was no grand concept behind one of hip-hop's defining 1986 covers, just a label that wanted the band on the front. Here is how a tilted camera and a borrowed eye for color turned that simplicity into something striking.
A man in an oversized cream suit caught mid-motion, his head cropped clean off the frame by a black half-circle. Talking Heads turned a body in a too-big jacket into one of pop's most recognizable images, now hanging in MoMA. Here is the story behind the big coat.
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.
Pink Floyd's most stripped-down sleeve is a plain white brick wall, no text at all on the original. Behind it sits a feud, a fired design group, and a political cartoonist scribbling the title in red across a kitchen table in the South of France.
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.'
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.
Kraftwerk turned a railway emblem into a swooping white bird against pure black, the TEE roundel resting where a heart might be. Behind the calm logo lies a scrapped mirror concept, two cities' worth of mannequin portraits, and a title track that would later power 'Planet Rock.'
The red star glaring out of a field of stars almost cost Rush their record deal. Mercury nearly dropped the band, granted one last album, and got the one that saved them. Here's how Hugh Syme and Neil Peart turned a pentagram and a naked man into rock's most recognizable accidental logo.
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 heraldic crest floats on pure white: two golden lions, a phoenix with outstretched wings, a flaming crab and two fairies guarding a crowned letter Q. It looks like royalty, but every creature on it is a hidden horoscope. Freddie Mercury, art-college trained, drew the band's zodiac into a coat of arms.
A Columbia producer heard it and snapped, 'It's a piece of shit! It's not produced.' Recorded cheap in a Garland, Texas studio with barely more than guitar, piano, and drums, Willie Nelson's spare murder-ballad concept album turned a dismissed 'demo' into the record that made him a superstar.
Only 20,000 lucky buyers got Bob Marley's Island debut inside a working Zippo lighter that flipped open on a hinge. When that sleeve proved too expensive and too fragile, it vanished, replaced by the smoldering portrait most of the world now knows.
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.
Stare at the rose on the Grateful Dead's 1970 cover, then read the swirling script around it. It says American Beauty. It also says American Reality. The same letters, two meanings, deliberately built that way by two poster artists who turned a single word into a riddle.
When Milton Glaser built this 1969 cover, he wanted strangers to stop and ask 'What the hell is that?' The face staring back, half-lit and unblinking under a battered hat, belonged to an unknown songwriter whose name couldn't sell a single record. So Glaser sold the stare instead.