Album Cover Designers: The New Iconographers

When I was younger, I distinctly recalled noticing the dilemma faced, by album cover designers, when cassette tapes were introduced. Going from the large format LP to the small awkwardly vertical cassette cover had a big impact on design solutions. The CD reintroduced a canvas more square in shape but still diminutive compared to a real "album cover". Fast forward to today and you can see the latest challenge for album cover designers, the digital version of album art. Digital music players like iPod and Zune, that can now display album art, have reintroduced the importance of design and branding in music. There was a stretch there, where artwork was not so easily attached to the digital music. Apple's Coverflow (purchased from original creator steelskies) reintroduced the metaphor of browsing through a pile of records, albeit very tiny records .

How will this change trends in album art design? Will there be bolder, larger, simpler designs? Or is this no different from the challenges faced by traditional LP cover designers who aimed to make a large format record stand out on a shelf in a record store? We shall see, but I expect to notice a greater influence as album art designers start thinking like icon designers. One recent example, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails just released a free full length recording "The Slip". Like his last free album before it (Ghosts), each song has its own piece of artwork associated with it. 10 'covers', and a PDF booklet for one 'album'- now that's something new.

Icon Design: Anti-Aliasing

This is a great how-to article covering the process for tweaking vector art in pixel-preview mode so that the 16x16 versions of the icons do not suffer in quality compared to the larger sizes you may be targeting.