It’s 60 years since Steinweiss’s breakthrough, but his story has lessons for us still
by John Bungey
It is one of the iconic record sleeves — on a coal-black background a piercing shaft of white light elegantly splits into the colours of the spectrum. This, however, is not Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. This is Alex Steinweiss’s 1942 cover for a recording of Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto. Great designers think alike, it’s just that Steinweiss thought alike three decades earlier.
This is not the only example of inspirational work by the American who is credited with singlehandedly creating the format, design and graphic “language” of the album cover. A book of his work — Alex Steinweiss, The Inventor of the Modern Album Cover — is published next month. Now 92, Steinweiss has designed some 2,500 sleeves.
Through the 1920s and 1930s, 78rpm discs were routinely sold in plain cardboard sleeves. When the 23-year-old Steinweiss became the first art director for Columbia Records in 1939, he convinced a sceptical management that it was worth creating packaging to reflect the beauty of the music.
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timesonline.co.uk
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