The incredible shrinking album cover

Faced with sluggish CD sales, artwork designers are readjusting for a digital world

from the May 11, 2007 edition

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Jeff Kleinsmith, a longtime designer for Sub Pop, the Seattle-based indie label, values packaging in the more traditional form – the actual compact disc. "We can make it more interesting. That can include extra songs, or a live DVD. It can be a configuration of the CD that's not common – it folds out, or includes lots of photos."

But isn't that backward thinking? The Recording Industry Association of America notes that US compact disc sales were down 13 percent in 2006, even as digital album sales doubled and overall digital music sales increased by over 74 percent. On the face of it, the changing market might signal that physical CD packaging is rapidly becoming a worthless endeavor. That's not necessarily so, however. As Daniel Gross pointed out in Slate in March, "What we are witnessing is not so much the imminent death of CDs but the death of the old methods of selling CDs." CDs may be a disappearing medium, Mr. Gross argues, but people are still buying them – baby boomers and classical music fans, to name a few.

Over at Blue Note, EMI's jazz-focused imprint, creative director Gordon Jee is not worried about digital music. "Jazz and classical are below the radar, so it's easier than the pop world," he notes. Mr. Jee says album designers have adjusted to their shrinking canvases, but they aren't yet envisioning how the cover will look once it is reduced to the 50-pixel, square image common to blogs and digital music stores. "We're still looking at the five-inch square as a springboard for our image."

Few designers admit to creating album art on digital music's tiny scale. But they do admit to making adjustments. At Blue Note, fonts may soon be forgotten. "Typography is a challenge," says Jee. "It's more important that the image communicates without words who the artist is."

Marowitz says simplicity is key. "I try not to cram the cover full of stuff, because I know that people will be looking at it as a one-inch square. But it still irks me that I have to simplify what I want to be a complex design."

Still, her outlook is realistic. "That's technology – you just have to roll with it."

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