Design & the Album cover

View my paper here.

I've been pretty overwhelmed by the variety of approaches people have taken with this assignment. My thinking was to integrate the "invention" of the album cover into Drucker & McVarish's critical history. This meant mostly focusing on the 20th century in my paper. I'm not sure how much of this will make it into the final paper/project, but what I got out of Drucker/McVarish was if I'm thinking of music as a "text," then I've got to consider the packaging and the ideas communicated by that as well as what is contained in the actual recording. This didn't entirely escape me before, but now I have a useful text to use as a start when considering the album cover/packaging as textual/symbolic/visual communication.

- William "Greg" Bryan