I have mentionned already on a couple of recent occasions that I wanted to talk about french band Niagara and how their quick little blurb on an all-commercial music TV station made me realize what should be common knowledge concerning the designing of album covers, and that is what the title already mentionned: the format of the release will dictate the final composition of what the cover will be.
This was around the time of the early 90s when grunge was picking up quickly, electronic music was becoming quite passé, and an important shift in the music industry began taking shape: the death of vinyl records, the slight continuation of the cassette format, and the increasing dominance of the CD format for mass musical consumption. I recall an interview by french band Niagara who were promoting their latest LP "Religion", which offered a slight change in sound moving towards the escalating grunge/heavy guitar sound of the era. Anyway the interview was Nothing special since most questions were in reguards to the singer's look and dancing and whatnot, but at one point the subject came on the album art, to which multi-instrumentalist Daniel Chenevez starting saying that ever since the death of vinyl as we knew it, album cover design had to be adapted to now be seen on a format about 3 times smaller. He said that when one rumages through a record store (another dying institution), the Customer,s eyes now had to focus on a smaller format to grab the attention/to identify the product in question, and so the design of "Religion" 's front cover was made for CD and cassette release, as opposed to a 12x12 format of a vinyl record.
This was quite revealing to me as I had been designing cassette covers for quite a few years now and was at the time in the process of having to do a wider range of cassette runs and so album cover design for the cassette format (way before it became hip to release cassette, mind you) was Something I took seriously, especially considering the fold-out option and the cheapest means to come up with a fast way to "DIY" for fast and bulk production, which is why most Wreck Age cassettes starting around the 1996 up until about 2002 or so have a similar general design and that wide fold-out version (as displayed in the image below)
Of course when I was doing major cassette releases, the format was already become archaic, leaving the prefered one the CD, before vinyl became hip again. Anyway this isn't a post about me bitching againt the ever-chaging current of musical physical formats, but rather how it explains why the artform of visual designing an LP cover is pretty much dead now since for the most part (in most cases), most people only view "cover art" on a small cell phone tactile screen, and so there is no need to design an intricate beautiful piece of art for the 12x12 format anymore, which is a shame since record covers were a perfect medium to do art which was meant to accompany the audio contained within. So let's keep moving along here...
This was around the time of the early 90s when grunge was picking up quickly, electronic music was becoming quite passé, and an important shift in the music industry began taking shape: the death of vinyl records, the slight continuation of the cassette format, and the increasing dominance of the CD format for mass musical consumption. I recall an interview by french band Niagara who were promoting their latest LP "Religion", which offered a slight change in sound moving towards the escalating grunge/heavy guitar sound of the era. Anyway the interview was Nothing special since most questions were in reguards to the singer's look and dancing and whatnot, but at one point the subject came on the album art, to which multi-instrumentalist Daniel Chenevez starting saying that ever since the death of vinyl as we knew it, album cover design had to be adapted to now be seen on a format about 3 times smaller. He said that when one rumages through a record store (another dying institution), the Customer,s eyes now had to focus on a smaller format to grab the attention/to identify the product in question, and so the design of "Religion" 's front cover was made for CD and cassette release, as opposed to a 12x12 format of a vinyl record.
This was quite revealing to me as I had been designing cassette covers for quite a few years now and was at the time in the process of having to do a wider range of cassette runs and so album cover design for the cassette format (way before it became hip to release cassette, mind you) was Something I took seriously, especially considering the fold-out option and the cheapest means to come up with a fast way to "DIY" for fast and bulk production, which is why most Wreck Age cassettes starting around the 1996 up until about 2002 or so have a similar general design and that wide fold-out version (as displayed in the image below)
Of course when I was doing major cassette releases, the format was already become archaic, leaving the prefered one the CD, before vinyl became hip again. Anyway this isn't a post about me bitching againt the ever-chaging current of musical physical formats, but rather how it explains why the artform of visual designing an LP cover is pretty much dead now since for the most part (in most cases), most people only view "cover art" on a small cell phone tactile screen, and so there is no need to design an intricate beautiful piece of art for the 12x12 format anymore, which is a shame since record covers were a perfect medium to do art which was meant to accompany the audio contained within. So let's keep moving along here...
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