28 cover stories in our archive
Behind the Covers' archive includes 28 album covers documented under the "typography" design theme, spanning the 1950s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, 2020s. These covers sit within the hip-hop, pop, electronic, alternative, rock, indie, r&b, folk, punk, funk, reggae, country tradition and feature work by Playboi Carti, Charli XCX, Taylor Swift, Pixies 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.
Playboi Carti's third studio album features bold typography-forward cover art that abandons traditional photography for pure textual impact, continuing his minimalist visual evolution.
Charli XCX designed her own deliberately ugly lime green cover using Arial font, creating one of 2024's most memed and culturally impactful album designs. The intentionally amateurish aesthetic spawned countless imitations and redefined pop album art.
A striking black-and-white portrait shows Swift with newspaper-style text covering half her face, embodying her transformation from country sweetheart to defiant pop star after public controversies.
Nearly three decades after he first gave Pixies a visual language at 4AD, Vaughan Oliver returned for Head Carrier with illustrator Ian Pollock and young designer Joshua Price. The orange, uncanny front cover combines lyric-driven imagery with handmade wooden lettering, making the reunion-era record feel connected to the band's past without simply imitating it.
The Life of Pablo's cover was designed by Belgian artist Peter De Potter, who turned repetition, family photographs and an abrasive orange field into an image that felt deliberately unfinished. Kanye West revealed the artwork on February 11, 2016, crediting De Potter directly. Its stacked typography and pasted-in photographs matched an album whose title, track list and even finished mixes kept changing in public.
Jamie xx built In Colour around a radial spectrum of saturated colour and a tilted white rectangle taken from one leg of The xx's X. Jamie Smith said he designed the cover to represent the different shades of the album and his earlier releases; Phil Lee is also credited for artwork. The sleeve is driven by colour and geometry, not front-cover typography.
The minimalist waveform design conceals 'AM' within its amplitude-modulated signal pattern. Designer Matthew Cooper created this iconic black-and-white artwork that perfectly matched the band's visual aesthetic for their hit 'Do I Wanna Know?' video.
A saturated orange field, two sharply different typefaces and a few flash-like color spots give Frank Ocean's Channel Orange one of the most recognizable sleeves of the 2010s. The album artwork is credited to Thomas Mastorakos, Aaron Martinez and Phil Toselli.
Feist's silhouette, photographed by Mary Rozzi, became the center of Simone Rubi's design for The Reminder: a spare profile surrounded by fine radiating color lines born from a collaborative visual process in Paris.
Hot Fuss begins with a photograph, not a black typographic anti-cover. A hazy blue row of buildings on the outskirts of Beijing sits beneath glowing red Chinese rooftop characters, with The Killers' white dotted logo and the red album title suspended in the sky. Louis Marino handled art direction; Matthias Clamer has identified the source image as his 2000 Beijing photograph, while the original sleeve credits Seth Goldfarb / Photonica for the cover photo.
Death Cab for Cutie's Transatlanticism cover was created by Seattle artist Adde Russell: a black bird tangled in vivid red string against a warm ochre field, developed from a white Styrofoam hobby-shop bird and credited to Russell for original artwork and layout.
Wayne Coyne painted Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots as a surreal face-off: a small girl seen from behind stands before an enormous pink robot, her shadow stretching across a warm orange-red landscape. George Salisbury handled the album package's design/layout. The standard 2002 sleeve is a hand-painted narrative image, not the text-only white cover previously described on Behind the Covers.
Three circles, three colors, three pictograms: a red airplane, yellow pants and a green jacket. Blink-182's Take Off Your Pants and Jacket turned its crude title joke into one of the cleanest sleeves of the pop-punk era. Tim Stedman art-directed the package and designed it with Marco Orozco, while Greg Lindy at Intersection Studio created the icons. Early editions split the album into three symbol-coded variants, each with its own pair of bonus songs.
The cover of Fiona Apple's When the Pawn... is inseparable from the album's famously long title, a 90-word poem Apple wrote after reading hostile letters about herself in SPIN. Apple is credited with the cover-art concept and design, turning the sleeve into part portrait, part rebuttal, and part declaration of control over how she would be seen.
Spiritualized turned the 1997 release of Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space into a piece of pharmaceutical theatre. Jason Pierce and designer Mark Farrow packaged the CD like medicine, complete with blister pack, foil backing, dosage language and patient-information-style typography. The idea grew from Pierce's belief that music could function like medicine for the soul.
Sublime's 1996 self-titled cover began as something much more ordinary: a photograph tattoo artist Opie Ortiz took after lettering the band's name across Bradley Nowell's back. After Nowell died two months before the album's release, that image replaced the originally planned clown artwork and became both the band's most recognizable cover and an accidental memorial.
The Score is built around the Fugees themselves. Marc Baptiste photographed Wyclef Jean, Lauryn Hill and Pras Michel as three separate faces emerging from deep black, while BRAIN handled art direction and Richard O. White shaped the graphic package. Warm orange-gold lettering frames the portrait rather than replacing it.
Protection does not abandon the visual language of Blue Lines — it transforms it. Massive Attack's 1994 sleeve places torn, burned-looking flammable-gas hazard artwork over a cold metallic surface, with the silver Eurochild figure at the center. Original-release credits list artwork to Massive Attack and Michael Nash Associates.
Peter Gowland's portrait of Weezer — four band members standing in ordinary clothes against a carefully chosen blue field — became so inseparable from the record that the band's 1994 debut is known simply as the Blue Album. Karl Koch handled design, with Michael Golob credited for art direction.
LL Cool J's comeback album features one of hip-hop's most aggressive cover designs, with stark red typography that screams the title like a boxing match announcement. The minimalist approach perfectly captured the album's confrontational energy.
Prince stripped away his usual purple fantasy for stark black typography on white—a radical departure that reflected the album's serious social commentary. The minimalist design was Prince's own creation, abandoning rock star imagery for newspaper-style urgency.
So put Peter Gabriel's face at the center of the sleeve after years of more oblique cover concepts. Trevor Key made the close black-and-white portrait, Peter Saville designed the cover, and Brett Wickens created the distinctive So lettering. Saville later recalled using the same unusual Polaroid roll-film process he and Key had used for New Order's Low-Life portraits, combining photograph, typography and a blue campaign device into a deliberately recognizable identity.
The cover that almost featured a bikini-clad model on a wet slip-and-slide became one of rock's most iconic designs when the band chose bold yellow typography over a mysterious plastic bag instead. The original shoot was deemed too risqué, leading to this instantly recognizable minimalist masterpiece.
Licensed to Ill looks like a private jet until you open the sleeve. Rick Rubin conceived the Beastie Boys' exaggerated rock-star aircraft; art director Stephen Byram and artist David Gambale, working as World B. Omés, turned the joke into a gatefold crash scene whose tail number 3MTA3 reads EATME in a mirror.
The stark, minimal cover for Dire Straits' biggest album features just the band name and title in simple white text against a deep blue background. This stripped-down approach perfectly matched the album's sophisticated, contemplative mood and became iconic through sheer restraint.
Jamie Reid's ransom note typography and fluorescent yellow background created punk's most iconic visual manifesto. The DIY cut-and-paste lettering launched a thousand photocopied flyers and sparked multiple obscenity prosecutions across Britain.
The iconic album cover for this reggae soundtrack featured artwork by John Bryant and sleeve design by London's CCS Associates. Bryant's vibrant illustration depicts Jimmy Cliff with dual pistols, using hand-drawn typography rendered in Bottleneck typeface with colorful gradients.
The groundbreaking debut album from Johnny Cash marked the first LP ever released on Sam Phillips' legendary Sun Records label, featuring classic tracks like 'I Walk the Line' and 'Folsom Prison Blues' with an iconic cover design that helped establish the visual identity of rock and roll's birthplace.