How album art came to be

Picture: The New York Times

This is Alex Steinweiss. He's neat because he was the originator of album cover artwork. Before Steinweiss came along, most album covers looked like this:

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As in -- they were pasteboard sleeves stamped with the work's title and the artist's name, and that's pretty much it.

Record labels did offer "record albums," but these weren't for individual albums; they were for a collection of albums. Generally all of these collection covers looked the same.

Enter 23-year-old Steinweiss, newly hired as Columbia Records's first art director. His job description included designing promotional displays and advertisements for the record label. But Steinweiss decided it would be cool to replace the plain brown/tan/green paper album covers (which he said "were not attractive, and lacked sales appeal") with brightly decorated, visually pleasing designs to attract customers' attention.

His first go at it was a cover for Rodgers & Hart, for which he and a photographer found inspiration in the Imperial Theatre's marquee -- they got the owner of the theater to change the marquee signage to say what appears on the cover of the album pictured here.

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And here we find ourselves with the very first album cover.

With Steinweiss's beautiful album artwork, record sales increased by almost 900%, which Columbia realized was a huge success. Ever since then our album covers have been graced with unique, interesting and engaging visual artwork. And Steinweiss's covers are well-known as symbols of the golden age of jazz, popular, and classical music.

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You can view many more designs at Steinweiss's website.

"I love music so much and I had such ambition that I was willing to go way beyond what the hell they paid me for. I wanted people to look at the artwork and hear the music." -Alex Steinweiss

By the way -- here is a great New York Times article on Steinweiss's life; a bit of biographical information for those wanting to know more about the man behind the album artwork.