If you like album covers art, you need to know about the work of this guy. His name is Storm Thorgerson and he did more album covers than you imagine. He was one of the first artists to worry about the musical image. He did and still does unbelievable amazing covers. Since the beginning of his successful career, he have done covers of bands like Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath and today, covers from bands like Muse, Megadeth and Mars Volta.
Who doesn't know this picture? Well, you don't need to be a music fan or a rock fan to know this revolutionary album cover art. Pink Floyd always had a reputation for beautiful covers that represents their philosophy. This owes much to Storm Thorgerson's work. He changed the design concept of showing the beautiful faces of bands members, especially talking about Pink Floyd, who have never had a reputation to be a handsome group, but they were known being junkies who make psychedelic music.
The importance of Storm Thorgerson work is so great that the consumers has been educated to criticize covers arts and his references kind of pushed all the designers to do something more. A beautiful cover art can sell an album and show the album spirit and the band style. Today with so much illegal CD copies, records companies will need to give as much to attract the consumers, as only one record with good songs can be downloaded in less than 30 minutes.
Talking about quality, imagine the time this album was released, which was a musical revolution. You enter in a store and look into this album cover on a shelf. Clearly this visual and music influence helped this album to become mythological.
This simple design certainly makes you think, "I would do it also!", but what makes this cover so damn good is the simplicity and the idea. Create images from music is very hard. It's a shame that the album covers designers aren't valued as they deserves.
http://www.stormthorgerson.com/ to know more about this brilliant artist.