The Velvet Underground & Nico (1967)

The album cover for The Velvet Underground & Nico is recognizable for featuring a Warhol print of a banana. Early copies of the album invited the owner to "Peel slowly and see"; peeling back the banana skin revealed a flesh-colored banana underneath. A special machine was needed to manufacture these covers (one of the causes of the album's delayed release), but MGM paid for costs figuring that any ties to Warhol would boost sales of the album. Most reissued vinyl editions of the album do not feature the peel-off sticker; the original copies of the album with the peel-sticker feature are now rare collector's items.



In January 2012, the "Velvet Underground" business partnership (of which John Cale and Lou Reed are general partners) sued The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York after the Foundation licensed the cover's banana design to Incase Designs for use on a line of iPhone and iPad cases.

Underworld + tomato art design collective

tomato is an art design collective founded in 1991 in London by John Warwicker, Steve Baker, Dirk Van Dooren, Karl Hyde (of Underworld), Rick Smith (of Underworld), Simon Taylor, and Graham Wood. Tomato's work includes television and print advertising, corporate identity, art installations, clothing, and of course the design for Underworld's various channels of output. In its existence, tomato has built an international reputation for working across different media, creating designs for all manner of clients such as Reebok, Adidas and Levi's; and identity for museums and cultural centers.



Underworld - Dubnobasswithmyheadman (1994)

Tomato designed the artwork for Dubnobasswithmyheadman. It features black and white type that has been "multiplied, smeared, and overlaid" so much that it is nearly unreadable, alongside a "bold symbol consisting of a fractured handprint inside a broken circle".
According to the authors of The Greatest Album Covers of All Time, the cover "set a new standard of presentation for subsequent Dance albums". In Graphic Design: A New History, Stephen Eskilson cites the cover as a notable example of the "expressive, chaotic graphics" that developed in the 1990s, a design style he calls "grunge". Paul Zelevansky of the journal Substance says that "the packaging … replays the visual poetry of the 1960s and '70s and fast forwards to the alchemical transformations of computer graphics packages.

další spolupráce Underworld a tomato:

Interpol - Our Love to Admire (2007)

At first glance the cover looks like an image from National Geographic or a still from an Animal Planet documentary. On closer inspection you see that the animals are in-fact taxidermy. The cover and inside imagery are the work of New York photographer Seth Smoot. Most of the images are staged in a dry or cold landscape and depict harsh scenes from the animal world.

Somehow the artwork seems to make sense when listening to the album. Interpol’s traditional black, white and red colour scheme is gone (which could reflect the bands move to a major record label) but a bleak atmosphere is still prevalent.

There is also some beautiful typography provided by David Calderley.

Massive Attack - Mezzanine (1998)

The sleeve for Massive Attack’s 1998 album, Mezzanine, was conceived and executed by band member Robert Del Naja (also known as “3D”) along with collaborator Tom Hingston. The pair took a photograph created by fashion photog Nick Knight — who had once snapped shots of insects for the Museum of Natural History — and manipulated it into a stunning (and somewhat frightening) nightmare of an album cover. “Knight added a metallic edge to the image by combining several color copies together and photographing them.”

Arcade Fire - Neon Bible (2007)

The artwork for the album is a photograph of a six-foot neon sign that the band commissioned for use while on tour. In the photograph used for the cover, the lighted Bible is caught in mid-flicker. Rolling Stone named the artwork one of the five best of the year. AOL Music cited the cover as an example of an artist "keeping artwork alive." The artwork would go on to win Tracy Maurice and François Miron the Juno Award for best CD/DVD Artwork Design of the Year. Frontman Win Butler stated in an interview that the album title is derived from him being particularly attracted to the image, not from the John Kennedy Toole novel The Neon Bible.

Minor Threat - Minor Threat (1981)

Minor Threat are credited with being one of the first hardcore punk rock groups to come out of the USA. It is true that amongst the punk-underground-alternative-independent-etc scene this album cover, a photo of Alec MacKaye (Ian’s brother) asleep after a gig taken by Susie Josephson Horgan, has taken on an almost iconic status.

The strength in the sharpness of the colour and the descending print on the right-hand-side is confronting and satisfying. The bald head, the boots, the second-hand clothes and the garbage on the cement floor leave one in little doubt that, if the scene is not desperate, it is one that reflects a subculture of some sort. The band and the label themselves recognised the power of the image by using it three times in different colors.

Roots Manuva - Slime & Reason (2008)

“The building of the head was a long process, and one that we weren’t quite sure how to approach. We thought originally that we would commission a sculptor to make the bust, but that was extremely expensive and the result may not have looked exactly like Roots, then we thought about a live cast of the head in plaster, but they can often look quite ‘dead’, the face can sag in the plaster and there isn’t much flexibility with the expression.

So after some looking around we found out about 3D scanning and rapid prototyping. This was the best option, the scanning process is very quick and accurate, and having the 3D model in the computer meant we could edit the bowl into the head at that stage, before the rapid prototyping. The green slime was 3x bottles of green Aloe Vera hand soap.” (Design Studio: Oscar & Ewan)

Supertramp - Breakfast in America (1979)

The album's front cover resembles an overlook of New York City through an aeroplane window. It was designed by Mike Doud and depicted Kate Murtagh, dressed as a waitress named "Libby" from a diner, as a Statue of Liberty figure holding up a glass of orange juice on a small plate in one hand (in place of the torch on the Statue), and a foldable restaurant menu in the other hand, on which "Breakfast In America" is written. The background featured a city made from a cornflake box, ashtray, cutlery (for the wharfs), eggboxes, vinegar, ketchup and mustard bottles, all spraypainted white. The twin World Trade Center towers appear as two stacks of boxes and the plate of breakfast represents Battery Park, the departure point for the Staten Island Ferry.

Blur - Modern Life Is Rubbish (1993)

The album's title derives from stenciled graffiti painted along Bayswater Road in London, created by an anarchist group. For Albarn, the phrase reflected the "rubbish" of the past that accumulated over time, stifling creativity. Albarn told journalist John Harris in 1993 that he thought the phrase was "the most significant comment on popular culture since 'Anarchy in the UK'". Due to Blur's disdain for America at the time, the album's working title was "Britain versus America".

The painting of the steam train on the album cover was a stock image that Stylorouge—Blur's design consultants—obtained from a photo library in Halifax. Inside the packaging, there is an oil-on-canvas of the band dressed as mop-top skinheads in a tube train. The album's lyric sheets also feature the songs' chord progressions, hand-written by guitar player Graham Coxon.

Burial - Burial (2006)

Burial’s tunes are ghostly, foggy, late night South London dance music. The beats are hazy and buried underneath layers of rain and pirate radio crackle, the melodies mournful yet hopeful, and vocal fragments echo into the distance. This is music for listening to at night, on a night bus or late walk home on the street.
The shot of foggy, late night South London not only evokes that feeling you’ll get when hearing the music, but the far-away distance of the shot itself hints at the distant melodies and vocal fragments contained within. Even the text has a foggy glow, like a street light glowing in the rainy night.

New Order - Blue Monday 12''



The artwork is designed to resemble a floppy disk. The sleeve does not display either the group name nor song title in plain English anywhere; the only text on the sleeve is “FAC SEVENTY THREE” on the spine. Instead the legend “FAC 73 BLUE MONDAY AND THE BEACH NEW ORDER” is represented in code by a series of coloured blocks. The key enabling this to be deciphered was printed on the back sleeve of the album, Power, Corruption & Lies. “Blue Monday” and Power, Corruption & Lies are two of four Factory releases from this time period to employ the colour code, the others being "Confusion" by New Order and From the Hip by Section 25.
The single’s original sleeve, created by Factory designer Peter Saville and Brett Wickens, was die-cut with a silver inner sleeve. It cost so much to produce that Factory Records actually lost money on each copy sold. Matthew Robertson’s Factory Records: The Complete Graphic Album notes that “[d]ue to the use of die-cutting and specified colours, the production cost of this sleeve was so high that the single sold at a loss.” Tony Wilson noted that it lost 5p per sleeve “due to our strange accounting system”; Saville noted that nobody expected “Blue Monday" to be a commercially successful record at all, so nobody expected the cost to be an issue. In fact, in Shadowplayers: The Rise and Fall of Factory Records, Saville states “I am so bored with this story. We didn’t even know how many of these expensive covers were ever made anyway.”
Robertson also noted that “[l]ater reissues had subtle changes to limit the cost” (the diecut areas being replaced with printed silver ink)


Deska je možná nejvíc prodávanej maxisingl vůbec - o to víc je zajímavý, že jí prodávali za míň než vyrobili..

Syd Barret - The Madcap Laughs (1969)

For the album cover, Barrett painted the floor of his bedroom in Wetherby Mansions orange and purple.
The nude woman appearing on the back of the record sleeve was an acquaintance of his known as "Iggy the Eskimo".
Photographer Mick Rock says, "When I arrived for 'The Madcap Laughs' photo session, Syd was still in his underpants .. His lady friend of two weeks, 'Iggy the Eskimo', was naked in the kitchen .."Iggy met Barrett in the summer of 1966, through Barrett's then-girlfriend, Jenny Spires. A year after Barrett had moved into Wetherby Mansions, Iggy moved in after Spires suggested. Iggy didn't know who Barrett was, that he was previously was in Pink Floyd. Barrett had played to Iggy several songs that would later appear on the album, one being "Terrapin", which she called "quite catchy".
In October 2010 she was interviewed, revealing that her name was Evelyn.
The album was designed by Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell of Hipgnosis.