15 cover stories in our archive
Behind the Covers' archive includes 15 album covers documented under the "logo" design theme, spanning the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s. These covers sit within the rock, pop, electronic, alternative, metal, r&b, country, folk tradition and feature work by David Bowie, MGMT, Portishead, Nirvana 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.
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.
Two young men stand on a beach at dusk in feathers, war paint, and hot-pink shorts, a pale moon hanging between them. This is MGMT before the world caught on: a costume-shop fever dream shot during a music video, stamped with a logo Andrew VanWyngarden drew by hand.
A small girl in a white dress stands alone on a pedestal while a giant faceless suit looms in the foreground, both branded with a single letter P. Portishead's 1997 self-titled album froze a frame from the 'All Mine' video into the most austere sleeve the band ever released, and the mysterious P logo began as an old Phillips badge.
When MTV's producer looked at Kurt Cobain's set requests and asked 'You mean like a funeral?', Cobain answered 'Exactly. Like a funeral.' Seven months later he was dead, and the lilies and black candles on this cover stopped looking like staging and started looking like prophecy.
A screaming, distorted face stares out from inside Def Leppard's triangle on 1987's Hysteria. Designer Andie Airfix reworked an entire eagle-lion-shark concept when the album's title changed, then split the art into nine secret panels that assembled into one giant mural.
The cross of skulls you know was never the first choice. Guns N' Roses wanted a robot rapist on the front of their debut, until America's record stores said no. The replacement began as a tattoo on Axl Rose's right arm.
Rick Rubin phoned a political illustrator who was drawing for the Village Voice and asked him to imagine hell. What Larry Carroll delivered was a three-foot canvas of goat-headed rulers and dangling bodies that Kerry King once dismissed as the work of a 'warped demented freak' before admitting it redefined metal.
One white-suited man, one raised arm, one pose that sold over 40 million records. The Saturday Night Fever cover freezes John Travolta mid-strut on a glowing disco floor, and behind him the Bee Gees hover like the sound made visible. Here is how a movie still became the best-selling album on earth.
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 Eagles wanted a classic California hotel rendered with a slightly sinister edge. To get it, two men dangled 60 feet above Sunset Boulevard on a cherry picker, shooting blindly into the sun. Almost nobody recognized the building they captured, and that was exactly the point.
Before the guitar-spaceships, an album cover team seriously pitched Boston lettuce, Boston cream pie, and a pot of baked beans. What won instead was a fleet of upside-down guitars escaping a dying Earth, an optical illusion millions never caught until Reddit lost its mind decades later.
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.
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.
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.
A man charges through a black forest swinging a sword, his pink-and-yellow body smeared into three blurred ghosts. He was supposed to be a War Pig. Then Warner got nervous about Vietnam, the album became Paranoid, and the cover never got the memo.