Babies Got Back ... Covers!

I've probably touched before on why I enjoy CDs more than MP3s. Mostly what it comes down to is the tangibility, the "realness", of them. A digital music file isn't something I can hold in my hands and appreciate, or become sentimentally attached to and pull off the shelf to look at fondly several years later, or (not that I necessarily have this in mind when I shop) trade in for a little store credit should I lose interest in it at some point. Even better, my CDs won't vanish into thin air if my computer's hard drive ever crashes or my iPod gets lost or stolen. Not to mention the thrill of the hunt, the rush of the catch, and the pride of owning a hard-to-find title that often come with anything of a collectible nature -- and I do consider my CD library a "collection".

Another reason I like CDs is for their sometimes beautiful, sometimes provocative, sometimes amusing front cover art -- and their often underappreciated or flat-out unappreciated back covers. I just recently was reminded of this while I was consolidating some of my home-burned discs from separate, single-disc jewelcases into the space-saving double-disc cases -- a chore which, more than coincidentally, went hand-in-hand with re-designing said covers, which is just as fun a part of the mix-making process for me as assembling the track lists and burning the discs. I was about to consolidate one particular series of homemade compilations (now numbering eight volumes, so it'd save a fair little chunk of real-estate), but looking at the back covers I joyously toiled over so many moons ago, I couldn't bring myself to get rid of them.

Which brings me to the reason for this post: an ode of sorts to the rear cover art of compact discs. While their main purpose is of course to provide the track listing for the CD, perhaps in an attractive font and with a picture of some sort for a backdrop, the more imaginative designs take it to the next level by giving the track listing an interesting visual twist, or maybe even going so far as to make it a work of art in itself. A few of the more appealing designs I've come across in recent years include:

• NSYNC's "No Strings Attached", which carries over the carnival-like motif from the front cover by displaying each song's name in a variety of whimsically ornate typefaces ...

• Duran Duran's "Wedding Album", which stylized the title of each track to look like labels or clipped-out newspaper headlines ...

• Landon Pigg's debut album, "LP", in which the artist laid out a grid and gave each song title the "Pictionary" treatment ...

• Johnny Mathis' latest release, "Let It Be Me: Mathis In Nashville", featuring a beautifully nostalgic design of textured block letters in various heights, weights, and colors ...

• and (if I may be permitted to toot my own horn) the back cover design of my own that I'm perhaps most proud of, Volume 2 in my "I Love Music" series, made to look like the selection board on an old-fashioned jukebox, complete with a charmingly imperfect manual-typewriter look to the font.
  

Obviously, when I compact two or more discs into one jewelcase, it means twice as many songs to list, so I have to make far more efficient use of space in the layout, usually requiring me to eliminate my unique, "panoramic" designs in favor of the simplified, columnar listings that are my more practical fallback scheme. That's not to say that less artistic designs are any less appealing; sometimes the old saying "less is more" is totally true. Track listings can be laid out in neatly arranged columns or in the more flexible method of paragraphs, and they can be written in a minimalist sans-serif, a formal serif, or a casual script font.

But anything, in my opinion, is better than the cold, unartistic, bland and lifeless "system" font in which the track listings appear for each and every album in each and every user's iTunes library ... all of them exactly the same. Sure, iTunes gives us a JPG image of the album's front cover art (or we have to go hunt for it on the web ourselves), but that's only half the artwork. The back covers are oftentimes just as fun to look at as the front covers, because they're part of the graphic designer's vision ... and they're one of the things I'd miss most in a world without CDs.