Cover Rejects

Today I was dig­ging around in my time machine hard drive look­ing for an old project that a client was want­ing to alter and re-print. Along the way I stum­bled upon a lot old projects that I had for­got­ten about. Being a designer is a unique process in that I cre­ate hun­dreds of “works of art” that I might love, but that, for what­ever rea­son, the client doesn’t choose. In some ways it might feel like rejec­tion, but it’s just the result of hav­ing a highly sub­jec­tive job. Every­one has an opin­ion on what is good and what is bet­ter, and it doesn’t always match up.

I thought it would be fun to show off some of the album cover rejects that are just hang­ing out unseen on my hard drive. While I tend to do much less album design these days in favor of illus­tra­tion work and book cover design, there is a fun ele­ment of feel­ing like “the sky is the limit” when it comes to album cre­ativ­ity, and some of these cov­ers per­haps pushed those bound­aries a tad too much for the respected artists.

Some illus­trated cov­ers that didn’t make the final cut:

I actu­ally pre­fer the final cov­ers cho­sen for both of these albums, but I still love these options and the illus­tra­tions on them. So fun.

I absolutely LOVE these explo­rations of pho­tog­ra­phy turn­ing into a draw­ing. The Mike’s Chair cover (above) will always be one that I’m sad never made the cut.

Some­times a cover doesn’t need any bells and whis­tles to be lovely. These are some of my favorite sim­pler cov­ers that didn’t make the cut.