Record sleeve and CD album cover design | Work | Shark Attack: a design studio

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Project notes
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Project notes

Project type

Over the years Rick Lecoat has designed more than a handful of record sleeves. Several dozens, in fact. Except that these days they are more often CD sleeves. But CD sleeves aren’t sleeves, they’re inserts. So maybe we should call them album covers. Except that some of them are singles.

Ugh. You know what we mean. It’s design for the music industry. Here is a selection of Shark Attack’s work.

Requirements

The record sleeve needs to perform on many levels. It has to:

Catch the eye of the customer in the shop;
Convey some message about the band, or the music, or both… even if that message is “We have no interest in conveying anything at all about ourselves or our music on the cover”;
Carry the required information about the music, whether that is legal notices, track listings, statements of publishing rights, or whatever;
Hopefully become an object of desire in its own right.

Mainly, though, it is a marketing tool for the record label.

Challenges

The obvious challenge is to keep coming up with ideas in an idea-saturated market. The best sleeves always start with complete freedom of ideas, not with a photoshoot. Once the label has spent money on a shoot, they rather feel that they have to use it, and that immediately kills off a million non-photographic ideas.

In addition to the objectives listed above there are considerations such as racking (the amount of the album cover that shows above the top of the rack in the record shop), and sticker placement (record stores tend to pile on promotional stickers onto the bit of the cover that is ‘above the fold’, and always in the same place. If you don’t take that into account you'll probably get the band’s name obliteratd by a “3 for £20” sticker).

Solution

It goes without saying that every sleeve is different. See the images in the other tab to see what we mean.

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Images

Click an image to open a larger version in its own window.

Dire Straits

Unquestionably the most widely recognised of all our sleeve designs. This sleeve was especially satisfying to work on as we had the chance to be involved in every aspect, from the original concept — which evolved from bass player John Illsley’s desire to have something sort of Cubist on the cover — right through to overseeing the photography (that’s the original guitar, and it comes with its own minder) and painstakingly putting all the pieces together in photoshop.

These days it would be a piece of cake, but this sleeve was designed just before Adobe introduced Layers into Photoshop. Great.

The second image is the flipside of the single accompanying the album release, and shows how the design was carried through the entire campaign.

Marc Almond

This was a fun project, not just because Marc Almond is an absolutely lovely bloke and a pleasure to work with but because of the cut-up-and-glue look of the inside pages. These involved finding lots of fun textures and printing out text onto odd papers (eg. the Financial Times) and cutting it out before getting it digitally scanned.

The bit that proved to be a real headache was the front cover on which the title was made out of red glitter. Scanning the glitter so that it looked glittery proved to be nearly impossible and the repro house hated us dearly by the end.

Elton John

A legend of the music business that we were honoured to get to design for. Elton had a very clear idea about what he wanted: the portrait of himself that had recently been painted by Julian Schnabel. And with the type styled in a very specific way.

As designers, this felt a bit limiting, but you know what? It’s Elton John, and if he wants something specific for his album cover then why shouldn’t he get it? He’s earned it, after all.

Chris de Burgh

When the Chris de Burgh job came along we had a look over his past albums to get a feel for the track history. To our mind they felt a bit cheesy, and we wanted to do something a bit more edgy, with less of the ‘Chris walking on a chessboard in outer space’ look.

Definition of Sound

These sleeves are not for an album; they are in fact sleeves for the various formats of Definition of Sound’s single ‘Child’. The top one is the 12-inch vinyl sleeve; the middle one is the CD single (the record company at the time was making the 12" sleeve visually distinctive from the CD design, as if people couldn’t tell them apart by size alone).

The bottom image is the set of 4 promotional 12" sleeves. The main 12" release was distinctive from the promos in that:

It had a different toned image
The logo had an image in the background
The image parts of the sleeve (ie. the top half and the logo lozenge) had a high-gloss spot varnish applied, whilst the black areas were matt.

Brenda Russell

The 12 inch sleeve accompanying the release of Brenda’s album ‘Between The Sun And The Moon’, which we also designed. This one is shown here because it’s the more interesting of the two. No, it’s not real gold leaf.

Incognito

Over the years we’ve designed perhaps half a dozen Incognito albums. They nearly always offer the chance to do something restrained and stripped back, which is a rare pleasure in a marketing-led industry like the music business. It’s hard to get much more minimal than this sleeve, unless we were to remove the image altogether. (We did suggest it).

Theaudience

Another promotional 12 inch sleeve, and a nice example demonstrating that you don’t have to have a picture of the band on the front.

We had already established a sort of faux-Charles Rennie Mackintosh style on previous theaudience covers, and played it big for this design.

The sleeve was printed in dark red and a metallic green, with the design revsed out on the back.

Pony Club

The yellow-green tones of this image work well. What didn’t work so well for Shark Attack was not getting an advance payment from an indie record company that was about to go into administration.

Oh well. Live and learn.

T-Rex

A classic marketing-pleaser, with the band name big and bold at the top of the sleeve and everyone’s favourite glam-rock icon slap-bang in the middle.

The Bolan picture received just enough psychedelic treatment to make it interesting without going over the top.

Incognito

Another, much later Incognito album, this time with a very different feel. The theme this time was futurism and modern cities at night, and the results formed a semi-abstract canvas of light and movement.

The second and third images show the two inner bags (opened out flat) from the double vinyl LP; one side of each bag was image-only with no text.

The final image is the front cover of a vinyl boxed set of remixes from the album. The box contained 4 12" discs in plain white inner bags.

Alisha’s Attic

This album for pop act Alisha’s Attic was unusual in for two reasons. Firstly, it featured on the inside the comic book-drawing skills of Philip Bond, who at that time was best known for his work in Deadline magazine (alongside his friend Jamie ‘Gorillaz’ Hewlitt).

Secondly, the cover shot prompted investigations into whether we could create a holographic cover to take advantage of the image’s depth of field re. the wine glass. (It turned out to be way too expensive).

Tim Lapthorn

One of the cover suggestions that we produced for Tim Lapthorn’s jazz album Seventh Sense. Striking, dynamic, memorable… we really wish that Tim had chosen this one instead of the far safer and duller one that he eventually picked. (Sorry Tim, but it’s true).

Captain & Tennille

This one came out of the blue, a back catalogue release by the record company. Rick is going to ’fess up now and admit that he had never actually heard of Captain & Tennille until working on this project.

Well, now he has.

Unused

And here’re our favourites from the ones that got away. Some of these were paid pitches that we simply didn’t win (yes, it happens), some were sleeves for records that, for one reason or another, just never got released (that happens too).

We’ll let you try and guess which are which.

On a final note, we were disappointed not to get our work on the cover the Bz album. Why? Well, you may never have heard of them, but apparently in Japan they are über rockers, like U2 and Springsteen combined.

In our heads we’d imagined designing a Bz cover to be akin to designing Sergeant Pepper. But in Japan.

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