In Jack’s reply to Michael about the endurance of vinyl, he mentioned this simple fact: “Album covers are cool, sleeves and gatefolds are neat, and it’s just fun to wield a vinyl record.”
Designing that stuff gave bands another avenue to be creative. Sure, you could just throw the record in a cardboard sleeve with a picture on the front, but that’s not going to stand out from the competition.
I remember when my dad brought his record player out from storage and set it up in the basement when I was younger. He has every Led Zeppelin studio album (except Led Zeppelin III, for reasons unknown). When looking through them for the first time, I was immediately attracted to Physical Graffiti, with the windows cut into the cardboard revealing the album’s name one letter at a time on the sleeve inside.
Their best design, though, is In Through the Out Door. That record came in a brown paper wrapper with the name stamped in the corner, unassuming at first. But then you learn that there were actually six different designs sold simultaneously, and record buyers didn’t know which one they were getting when they bought it. The black-and-white image on the sleeve is the same scene at a bar, but from six different perspectives, and the image would become color when it was painted with water. That’s pretty neat.
Bands still express their visual creativity today on social media, and they still need album-cover artwork to give streamers something to click on. There’s just something cool about being able to hold the packaging in your hands, though, and take it apart and put it back together — while your parents remind you to be careful, of course.
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