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Longtime designer Storm Thorgerson’s book, Taken By Storm: The Album Art of Storm Thorgerson
The Sydney Morning Herald takes a look.
The book features sleeves, covers and artwork for books, bands and exhibitions dating from the late ’60s up to 2006, for acts such as Led Zeppelin, American neo-prog outfit Mars Volta, Israeli agit-prop group Ethnix and English pomp rockers Muse. He even managed to make glum Irish popsters Cranberries look complex.
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Zdnet talks about new ways of packaging concrete CDs and design/marketing digital albums:
Last spring, Warner Music Group added interactive booklets based on Apple’s QuickTime software to about 75 albums sold on iTunes, providing photos and links to more multimedia content. The problem was it was also based on Flash technology, which the latest version of QuickTime disabled due to a security flaw.
Two somewhat related news items of note…
Netscape, which basically is now Firefox with a different skin, is finally getting its techno-plug pulled by AOL:
While internal groups within AOL have invested a great deal of time and energy in attempting to revive Netscape Navigator, these efforts have not been successful in gaining market share from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.
Digi-economic Darwinism at work, this. I don’t know any designer/developer after 2000 that even bothered with coding for Netscape’s parameters (remember all those “IE recommended” disclaimers on splash pages?), so this is just closing up the moneyhole for AOL. Nothing truly consequential, but it’s nice to know this bridge can finally be burned.
Relatedly, the much more stable IE7 has recently gained some market share in the browser battle, finally surpassing the CSS-suckified IE6. You can check that link, but I’m not so sure it’s a permalink, so here’s a screenshot.
This is good news for developers, since IE6 has many compliance issues than need workarounds and cost many hours per project when coming up with the fixes. I’ve experienced this firsthand many times. Let’s hope this trend continues.
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From Crave Online:
Rock royalty Queens of the Stone Age are in the process of creating an animated film based on Bulby, the smoking broken lightbulb that graces the cover of their latest album, Era Vulgaris
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…head Queen Josh Homme had this to say: “The title has an accidental air of seriousness, and I think that just helps to kind of illustrate that, ‘No, no, no, not that serious actually,’ you know. I also think that it kind of strikes a little bit of a balance between that ’50s generation of advertising, that sort of naive generation where Drippy the Oil Drop sold Exxon Oil or Fred Flintstone sold smokes, you know, which seems really Satanic.”
Interpretation of Josh’s explanation pending.
Don Clark of Invisible Creature got a Grammy Nomination for the design of Tooth and Nail release, Secrets Make You Sick, by The Fold.
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Orgasmatrix highlights 13 of the industry’s most graphic album covers. Be warned before clicking that link- these covers are pretty disgusting.
The criteria we used for the following ranking was based on the cover’s originality and historic and artistic value. It’s been done with heart and soul, after long debate and numerous, hot-headed conversations.
I disagree. Most of them aren’t even that great from an artistic perspective, but when you’re doing something for shock value, artistry is probably furthest from your mind. “Great” shock is pure rhetoric; great “art” only partially. But that’s just one man’s opinion.
Idolater’s readers give a thumbs up (?) to David Karsten Daniels
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