The Future of Album Art

Designers Work to Rescue a Dying Art Form -- the Album Cover:

The album cover -- once a crucial part of any band's identity -- has been dying a slow death for decades. For the most part, music fans put up with the shrinkage of album art from expansive vinyl records to hand-size plastic jewel cases. But with the music experience moving almost exclusively online, album art has suffered another compression -- this time all the way down to thumbnail images. (Worse still -- they're missing from most of the music files we've all ripped and downloaded.)

But music label designers are working to raise the album cover back up to an art form. They're experimenting with new tools and hatching plans to reinvent album art for the digital age, all while weathering the tectonic shifts that ultimately rule the music industry.