Aaron Horkey of Burlesque Design, Minnesota has created this amazingly detailed poster for American hardcore punk band Cable’s reunion tour. It also has the distinction of being the longest image I’ve ever posted. Spotted at OMG Posters.

Matt and Tony are two guys based in New York who've spent the last 30 years collecting vinyl LPs and 45s with funny, quirky and unusual covers. Now they've decided to share their collection with the world at the LP Cover Lover blog.

Here are just some of the many gems they’ve revealed so far:


Soul Snaps drum breaks have been sampled by Ol’ Dirty Bastard and The Prodigy.


Health and safety was a big thing in the fifties


It meant something different in those days apparently...

This, apparently is the world’s first album cover, designed for Columbia by then 23 year old designer Alex Steinweiss. Before this records were sold in generic sleeves. You can read the full story and see lots more images over at Udependent.

My good friend John Foley of bite! informs me that Adrian Shaughnessy is interviewing legendary graphic designer Storm Thorgerson on Resonance FM today. Storm is most famous for his album covers for Pink Floyd such as the iconic sleeve for Dark Side of the Moon (below). You can listen online at 4pm (GMT) today.

At a time when music packaging is on a downward spiral, French electro / folk / pop act ALB have generated a surprising amount of publicity for themselves on the back of the outrageously extravagant (and unashamedly retro) packaging for their debut album Magne-Disque. The album even comes with a mini-cover for each song. Catch the full low-down and lots more pics at Sleeveage.

Great cover for this Lindstrom and Prinz Thomas 12" on Eskimo Recordings.



Originally spotted at Iso50.

I'm loving the US indie poster scene at the moment. Venues commission their own posters from graphic artists who show little respect for artists’ branding and instead create beautiful and unique works of art, often in limited, hand-printed runs. Jeff Brooks is the creator of these marvelously simple and fun posters.







There’s lots more posters in Jeff’s gallery at gigposters.com.

The Creative Review Blog have a sneak preview of some of the excellent work that’s made it into the Magazine’s 2008 Annual.

I particularly liked these posters for London super-club Fabric, created by Village Green (can’t find a link for them unfortunately).





When Fabric first opened their posters and flyers were of a really high standard, and although the production values have remained consistently high, they never really achieved the heights of the collages created by Love in the club’s early days. Great then to see the club’s design work back to it’s slightly disturbing best with these unusually sinister characters created by Village Green’s Tom Darracott.

This poster for Spoon by Texas based F2-Design is printed with actual 45rpm records, making each one unique.



I'm also loving this one for New York Dolls in Chicago:



There’s loads more great posters at the F2-Design site, and if you’re quick you can snap up some of the remaining limited editions.

Sounds like a band, but The Small Stakes is in fact the name of Jason Munn’s Oakland California based independent design studio. Jason turns out a mean poster, as evidenced by his work below for bands like Broken Social Scene and The Postal Service.



There are loads more fantastic posters for sale in The Small Stakes shop.

I know it’s nearly summer when it’s once again it’s time to create an e-flyer for my favourite client Sancho Panza’s yearly series of boat parties. This year I decided to do something a little bit different so instead of creating the usual interactive extravaganza, I made a poster.



It's accompanied by a simple e-flyer where punters are offered a free PDF they can print themselves. They also have the option to order a high-quality print from zazzle.com. Zazzle is a print on demand service based in the US which allows you to configure your poster with a number of options including paper stock and print size. Unfortunately there’s no equivalent to this service in the UK right now so if you want one and you're not in the US you’ll have to grapple with the not-too-difficult task of paying with a credit card in US Dollars.

Scott Hansen turned up this quirky cover for Robert Fripp & Brian Eno’s excellently titled 1973 release, “No Pussyfooting” (a reference to the quick and spontaneous way the record was created). The music involved passing Robert Fripp’s electric guitar through an analogue tape loop developed by Eno, resulting in a deeply layered piece of what would later become known as ambient music. The visual concept of infinitely repeating mirrors perfectly illustrates the qualities of the music in a simple and striking way – design and art direction at it’s purest.

Nice website for Seattle band Death Cab For Cutie who also have the best band name, ever. A nice balance of Flash, typography, good design and layout, minus 10 points for the silly splash page. We did the 90s already remember? Site by Mathematics.

Tonight’s random surfing turned up this excellent poster for Philadelphia based band Audible by Philadelphia based illustrator extraordinaire Tim Gough. You can see lots more of his posters at GigPosters.com.



Tim also produces Cut and Paste, a beautiful hand-crafted zine he describes as “a collection of abandoned ideas, random doodles, and half finished leftovers” – you can order a copy from his shop.

An interesting twist on the usually oh-so-hip graphic design tome, Band ID looks at over 1,000 of what the authors consider to be the most powerful examples of band and artist logos. Unlike the likes of my Stefan Sagmeister book, there’s a small chance that if I put this on my coffee table my friends might actually pick it up. It’s not out till June but you can pre-order it from Amazon or the publisher Chronicle Books. I'm going to order it – stand by for a review soon.

Great motion graphics in this video for DVNO by french electro types Justice.

Scott Hansen has an article on this brilliant viral project by New York based designer Nikolay Saveliev. Saveliev created sleeves and inserts carrying faux–academic material on the state of the pop and music industries, but actually promoting indie radio stations. 140 copies were then “snuck” onto the shelves of record shops for browsing punters to discover. Check out the original post for lots more images.

Loads more at the Song Charts Flickr pool. Picked up at Swiss Miss.