While Times Square is home to MTV Studios, it also holds the Virgin Megastore, the largest music store in the world. That video of Times Square I posted earlier has a glimpse of the lit store. Whether it's a television network, a department store, or just street performers, the aesthetic presence of music within Times Square surely demonstrates Rybacki's take on it. "Music...has always had a visual element...the 'look' a band strived for in performance, concert staging, and promotional publicity have all helped create a visual imagery for rock" (Rybacki). I've already discussed how music videos made the look of a band more important, the use of concert staging to promote a band, but what I have not yet discussed is an album's cover design. "Cover design projects bring together two artists: the designer and the musician. They offer the opportunity to create a visual to represent a non-visual art" (Grant). Serving as a way to identify an album, some album designs have become as famous as the artists who release them. Such designs are featured in the video below (see link) in an entertaining battle that you'll just have to see for yourself:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=x6bUD9PJ6i8

Today it may seem as if album cover designs have been around since the beginning, but in fact, there was a time when 78s were packaged with a plain, cardboard cover, displaying only the title of the work and the artist. 78s are those big, round, vinyl things you keep seeing in the basement. It wasn't until 1939 that the concept of an album cover was developed. As the first art director for the recently formed Columbia Records, Alex Steinweiss seized the opportunity to approach the album design more creatively. Steinweiss attempted to draw a visual representation of the music and apply its moods and symbolism into the design. Eight years later, in 1947, Steinweiss implemented his design through his invention of the paperboard jacket, a protection of vinyl records against scratches, to which he could print his designs on. "Album cover design has over fifty years of history and, despite several format changes (78 to LP to cassette to CD), many things have remained the same" (Grant). When you think about it, the only thing that's really changed is the size of the design, which we'll discuss more further on. Steinweiss would occasionally use photographic images in his designs, a feat that was heavily appropriated by other album designers during the 1950s. Donald Kasprzak explains in "The Art of the Album Cover" that designs were no longer about the art, but were used instead as a commercial strategy and varied among genres of music.


Jazz albums of the 1950's produced great achievements in record cover art, not only for its heavy usage of photography, but also for its innovative combinations of color and type which helped to set jazz album covers apart. While budget concerns restricted the amount of colors used, covers with more colors tended to lack the success of those that used mainly black, white, and one other color.


As rock and roll emerged in the 1960s, the recording artists began to play a larger role in the design process by voicing their ideas, shifting the design process stylistically and conceptually.


The 1970s expanded upon the use of photography, transitioning into more illustrations of fantasy, but the 1980s and early 1990s brought the next big shift in style with the popularity of punk music. Winston Smith is the most notable artist of this genre, responsible for the cut-and-paste collage look that is commonly associated with punk.

"So well composed are the designs that they sometimes appear to be a painting. He seems most fond of using images from the 1950s, mashed-up and combined in a way to turn the innocent, happy feeling of the original pictures into rebellious, authority-questioning, psychedelic collages" (The Future of Album Art).