If the iPod didn't tell you, would you know what album this is?
I've recently been going through my entire CD collection, moving liner notes and discs into little sleeves and chucking the jewel cases. I've also been struggling to repair my busted record player, so between these two activities, I've spent a lot of time looking at, and appreciating, cover art. Of course, LPs reign supreme, with their relative acres of illustrated space. CDs, while more limited, do alright too sometimes, whether it's the cut-outs of the Shins' Chutes Too Narrow or the elaborate repackaging of Pavement's Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. Digitally, the first iPods ignored cover art altogether, but the newer models have the Cover Flow feature, intended to replicate flipping through your CD bin. Those little album cover thumbnails are changing the design game again, as pointed out by Steven Heller at Wired.
The tiny JPEGs displayed on iPod screens demand simplicity, bold color, stark imagery, and unadorned type. The sneering smiley face on Bon Jovi's Have a Nice Day is an aptly minimalist rendering. No Age's Nouns, on the other hand, is at once simple and complex, readable and abstract; the sculptural letterforms jump off the screen.
So which covers, old or new, work when you scroll through them on your iPod? A glance at mine reveals Outkast's Aquemini succeeds, but if I wasn't so fond of Mirah's Advisory Committee, I'd have no idea what it was!
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