sleeve design

Would Sgt. Pepper's be exactly the same without Peter Blake's cover ? At a time when full-length records do not mean much any longer and album covers even less, I found interesting to make a website on sleeve design. Long before videos, record covers were the visual embodiment of music, a way to put images on sound. I remember having spent hours as a teenager detailing the cover of records while listening to them. Later on, I realised that some of them had things in common in their design, revealing either a mere sign of the times or a more deliberate connection. Some records even obviously copied famous sleeves, as a tribute or as a mockery. Here is a collection of record covers I came across, which share some common visual features.

Biplane


Jefferson Airplane After Bathing at Baxter's (1967)	Joe Walsh The Smoker You Drink, the Player You Get (1973)

Demogorgon


Depeche Mode Exciter (2001)	Crosby & Nash Crosby & Nash (2004)

Bent over


Nutz Nutz (1974)	St. Vincent Masseduction (2017)

Censored text


Desaparecidos Payola (2015)	Roger Waters Is this the Life We really Want? (2017)	Various The Black Book (2018)

Sports and fashion


Roxy Music Flesh+Blood (1980)	The Style Council Walking the Night (1987)

Floating in space


Kyuss Into the Void (EP) (1996)	The Afghan Whigs 1965 (1998)

Chromatic


The Walker Brothers Images (1967)	Cat Power Jukebox (2007)

White banner on blue background


Queens Of The Stone Age R (2000)	F.S. Blumm & Nils Frahm Music For Wobbling Music Versus Gravity (2013)

Leaning on a brick wall with a passer-by


Nick Drake Nick Drake (1971)	Robert Plant The Principle of Moments (1983)

Chevron


Glasvegas Later... When the TV Turns to Static (2013)	Angelo Badalamenti Twin Peaks (reissue) (2017)

Cow face


Hanadensha The Golden Age of Heavy Blood (1989)	Swervedriver Mezcal Head (1993)	Urge Overkill Oui (2022)

Punctuation marks


Ray Anderson What Because (1990)	!!! (Chk Chk Chk) !!! (2000)

Portrait drawing


Neil Young Neil Young (1968)	MIJ Color by the Number (1969)

Sitting on a chair in water


Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson Summer of Fear (2009)	Dolores O'Riordan No Baggage (2009)

Made in Japan


Deep Purple Made in Japan (1972)	Elio e le Storie Tese Made in Japan (2001)	Dip Apple Made in Japan (2015)

Dark and twisted


Kanye West My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (unused cover) (2010)	Jon Connor The Late Registration of a College Dropout Who Had a Dark Twisted Fantasy of 808s and Heartbreak (2014)