STYLE : DESIGN : MUSIC BOXES

Back in the days of vinyl, the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” won a Grammy Award for Best Album Cover. If it were released today--on compact disc--fans would need a magnifying glass to make out all 69 faces on the cover.

With their “canvas” shrunk to fit a CD jewel box, designers have little, if any, room for error. Type that was easy to read on an album becomes just so many hieroglyphics. Band names and album titles not printed at the top of covers sink in the sea of CD store displays. And forget intricate illustrations and tiny photos (see “Sgt. Pepper’s”); the new look is simple yet arresting images in high-contrast colors.

“A cover should be interesting and readable and explosive. You want it to jump off the rack,” says Chuck Beeson, a senior art director at A&M; Records. “If you can make someone pick it up and hold it in their hands, then you’ve done your job.”

While designing a CD cover is exacting, it’s also liberating, prompting designers to try new riffs on old themes. “We always have to look for something new and fresh. That’s the challenge. Everyone’s trying to push the medium,” says Tommy Steele, vice president of art and design at Capitol Records. Which is why recent releases have featured computer typefaces and graphics, recyclable papers and organic inks, and innovative uses of materials such as wood, metal, even holograms and gel-filled plastic bags.

Creativity is most conspicuous in special packages. For a few dollars more than the price of a regular CD, listeners get their favorite music and a collectible visual treat--for instance, Tina Turner’s “Foreign Affair,” which resembled a passport, and Bonnie Raitt’s “Luck of the Draw,” a takeoff on a deck of cards. Both are a far cry from the very first Best Album Cover award winner in 1958, Frank Sinatra’s “Only the Lonely,” for which Old Blue Eyes himself was credited as art director.

The 1993 Grammy nominees for Best Recording Package, shown here, were chosen from about 350 entries by art directors around the country. None, it’s worth noting, is the standard-issue jewel box. That’s why designers want the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences to create separate categories for regular releases and the more spectacular special projects. Until then, competition--the winner will be named March 1--remains keen, if a little skewed. Says Steele: “There’s a great selection of goodies. Usually, I find one or two and think, ‘God, how did that get in there?’ But this year, I don’t have any questions at all.”

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R.E.M.’s “Automatic for the People”

(Reprise)

Art director Tom Recchion (nominated with band member Michael Stipe and art directors Jeff Gold and Jim Ladwig): “The package was meant to focus in on photos of the group by Anton Corbijn, but I wanted to present them in an unusual way. In talking with Michael Stipe, we came up with putting lyrics on the photos. We wanted to make something that, the more time you spent with it, the more you discovered. I tried doing them in varnish because I wanted the lyrics to be ghost-like, to take your eye by surprise. But we had so many problems realizing this idea that I ended up with a metallic ink at different percentages on vellum. Jeff Gold had a wooden box lying around, and Jim Ladwig found the people who could blind-emboss the title on wood. We did that to play up the whole idea of things not quite being there. The band is very conscious of the ecology, so the disc comes out of a brown sleeve. It’s a natural paper that has a nice, commonplace, low-tech feel to it. And the natural-cotton ribbon was a way to get the contents out of the box. I wanted the disc to be the only electronic, plasticky thing in the box.”

Paul Westerberg’s “14 Songs”

(Sire/Reprise)

Art director Kim Champagne: “We decided to re-create the book on the cover of the regular package, so we used the same typography and some of the same photos. The idea was to make something very intimate because Paul Westerberg is a very no-frills, very humble and simple guy. We didn’t want it to be too froufrou or overdesigned, so we used inexpensive materials and not a lot of color. But we did use green on the binding because it’s Paul’s favorite color. Paul and I went on a field trip to bookstores, where we looked at book covers and pulled some things that had the right attitude. Frank Ockenfels did most of the photography, but I took the photograph on the disc myself. I chose it because it had a nice mood to it.”

Art director Jeff Gold: “Bill Bentley did an interview with Paul that not many people saw, so we decided to include the whole interview. Because the title is ’14 Songs,’ I thought every page should be page 14. And I had the idea to have some extra pages at the end of the book labeled ‘Notes.’ We knew the book should look old and handcrafted because Paul’s music is very much handcrafted. It has the soul that an old book would have.”

Billie Holiday’s “The Complete Billie Holiday on Verve 1945-1959” Art director David Lau: “From the beginning, we wanted something that looked old and had a vintage look to it. When we did the CD holders, we tried to mimic the old 45 sleeves. The colors on the discs were taken from the old record labels. As far as the box goes, we wanted to reflect her music--mellow and mysterious. I wanted to use a varnish so that Billie Holiday’s image on the box would be black on black, but that was too subtle: You had to tilt the box to see it. So we used a gray image instead. My first idea for the book was to make a scrapbook, but there wasn’t enough time. It took almost half a year to finish the whole job because this book is not a normal CD booklet. It was very expensive to print 220 pages of information and photography, a lot of it by Herman Leonard, a big jazz photographer back then. Most of the photos were black and white, so I added tints and didn’t run type over people’s faces. I used the photo of the gardenia to break up each section because it was Billie Holiday’s trademark.”

Ozzy Osbourne’s “Live & Loud”

(Epic)

Art director David Coleman: “Epic wanted to do a unique package to commemorate Ozzy’s final tour. One of the concepts we came up with was this speaker grill. It seemed perfect for Ozzy’s heavy-metal, high-decibel sound. We wanted it to look like an actual speaker; that’s why I superimposed his face behind the metal grill and put his name on the plaque. There was no need to put any other graphics on the front. We ended up wrapping the box with a black stock with a nice grain. It was supposed to simulate the grain of leather on an industrial speaker. We also included two color tattoos that Ozzy, in fact, has on his own body. These were the signature tattoos: the O-Z-Z-Y on his fingers and the dragon. We also had a 24-page color booklet. I tried to capture the feeling of the tour and the story of Ozzy. I wanted a cross-section of photos, everything from tour mementos such as guitar picks, ticket stubs, parts of the itinerary. I wanted to take the fans on the tour.”

Pink Floyd’s “Shine On”

(Columbia)

Art director Storm Thorgerson (nominated with Stylorouge): “The first thing we did was decide to have a proper book, hardback, lots of information and all the photographs and designs used previously. And that’s what Stylorouge did. It’s very solid and a good read. Eight CDs come in the box, one for each of the seven albums, except for ‘The Wall,’ which is a double album. There’s also a bonus CD in a Digipak for the early singles. All the CDs come in a solid-black jewel box with an album cover that looks like a small postage stamp stuck on. When you put them together on the shelf, all the spines make up a design, ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’ cover. It’s a way to keep them in order. We also enclosed postcards to give people something to put somewhere else. Each postcard is an album cover. Aside from sending them to friends, you can pin them to the wall. The silver logo is made up of seven letters for the seven albums; a triangle, because that’s associated with ‘Dark Side of the Moon,’ and circles or planets, because Pink Floyd is kind of spacey. The album titles were all printed over each other to look like old script. This logo is a bit like a secret map: If you were to look into this secret map, you might find the secret to the universe. Or maybe not. The most important image is the one on the front of the box. All these figures are being elevated out of the water, which is what happens when you listen to Floyd music, I think. It lifts you out of the ordinary.”