“Disc designs play into hands of the consumer”, The Australian, 29-30 Jan 1994.
CD Packaging
In this post-pop world, packaging has eclipsed the product it contains. Well, almost.
Take the case of CDs for example. With music catalogues going back decades, record companies are having a field day reselling recordings that have long bitten the dust of history, only to be remastered and repackaged for a new (read re-saleable) digital format. And why not.
The real difficulty lies in choosing between the multitude of releases and re-releases. Faced with a veritable sea of “new” material to choose from, the packaging has become one of the most important things that convinces us to fork out hard-earned cash at the music store.
While record covers used to perform much the same task, the CD offers a whole new repertoire for the image makers to play with. The cover is still the first contact many of us have with a musician’s work. People are not so likely to purchase the music for the cover-art alone, as they might have in the late 60s, but they do expect the packaging to tell them something about the music inside.
It was Rick Griffin’s hallucinogenic cover design of 1969 for rock group the Grateful Dead’s “Aoxomoxoa” that sent many into appreciative cosmic raves, heralding the arrival of a new subcultural form. This was *real* art man.
The seventies airbrushed acid covers of Roger Dean took over where Griffin left off, setting new heights for cosmic pretensions. Working well into the 80s and 90s, Dean continued to create flying elephants for groups like Osibisa, and moonscaped mountains for Yes. The lurid glass effects used for the wrapping of music by Steve Howe, Nightwing, and Dave Greenslade has done little to bring these acts out of their rock obscurity. Thank god.
These days we’re more likely to be enticed by the novel packaging of pop groups like the Pet Shop Boy’s. Their recent CD “Very” comes in a variety of pink leggo style plastic cases, depending on whether you buy the UK import, the limited edition version, or the regular local release. It’s as if the coloured vinyl records of yesterday have been transformed into external graphic and tactile displays.
Canadian born Kim Champagne and LA based Jeff Gold have a reputation for designing some of the more novel promotional CD packaging. Under their art direction, British white soul group Squeeze released a recent limited edition in a ceramic pot. The 1989 CD for Aerosmith’s hard rock “Pump” CD came dressed in what the industry calls a “leather digi pack”, while fellow rockers ZZ Top came wrapped in (real) metal. Champagne and Gold also packaged the CD single “Been Caught Stealing” for American indy group Jane’s Addiction with a couple of miniature handcuff’s locked to the front cover.
Such novelty tricks have been around for a while, but that doesn’t make them unworthy of replication. Resident art director for Warner Brothers, Tom Recchion (who also designed Lou Reed and John Cale’s “Songs for Drella”, and David Lynch’s “Industrial Symphony”), bundled Prince’s 1989 soundtrack for “Batman” into a metal film canister, smothered with the corporate Bat insignia of course. Unlike a similar late 70s multi-record release by UK punk group Public Image Limited, the contents had no chance of being destroyed by the packaging before they were played. That was an essential part of PIL’s message anyway.
Since it was first invented, packaging has become less about protecting valuable goods and more about capturing a loyal market. In the music industry a label can say more about the musical product than the artist’s name. I have friends who’ll by anything on the jazz label Blue Note, so reliable is the connection between package, label, and product.
That’s also partly why Peter Saville’s contribution to Manchester’s Factory label was so important. Starting as the company’s art director in 1978, he defined an image that perfectly captured the industrial essence of groups such as Joy Division, who later went on to become New Order. Even after leaving to form his own practice in 1983, his distinctive style continued to be an integral part of the rock groups whose music he packaged.
Jeri Heiden has played a similar role packaging the work of former Prince band member Sheila E. Her “Sex Cymbal” single was released, strangely enough, in a cymbal can complete with two mini cymbals. Heiden also came up with the look for much of Madonna’s material released since the late 80s. Typical of most CDs these days, her packaging of the “Immaculate Collection” compilation includes a mandatory glossy booklet, featuring Herb Ritts’ photos in a stylish foldout.
In fact, the small size of the CD has inspired many designers to create large foldouts that concertina into a neat little box. Steve Byram’s artwork for Midnight Oil’s 1990 “The Green Disc” opens out on all four sides, revealing a glowing green laser disc inside. Mambo’s design for their “Masterplan” compilation CD of 1992 similarly folds out from the centre to display wild cover art by David McKay. According to the liner notes at least, this is only natural for a design group like Mambo: “By combining the precocious talents of a small group of surfing, musical & graphic artists, Mambo has bared its broad hedonistic buttocks at the perception that a surfwear company can only do one thing at a time.” Indeed they don’t.
Ultimately you still can’t judge a book by its cover. Not yet anyway.