Album covers say a thousand words

DD Smash won 1983's album cover award with this effort.

Some of the greatest albums of all time are best known by their covers. Jimi Hendrix's Electric Ladyland is one - with its lounging, naked women. And there's no mistaking the White Album by the Beatles, and that black one by Metallica.

You may think that with downloading and CD-burning there's little need to bother much about the cover and the artwork that's an essential part of it.

But how about the cover of Tha Feelstyle's album Break It To Pieces? There's a beautiful woman with dark velvet skin, big brown eyes and a hibiscus flower behind her ear.

It's the type of album that makes just having the music not enough - you want the artwork, you need the whole package.

Last night, when the New Zealand Music Awards finalists were named, the technical winners were also announced. Best album cover was Break It To Pieces (credited to the quartet of Kas Futlialo aka Tha Feelstyle, Grant Osborne, Andrew B. White and Andy Morton).

The other finalists were Chris Brunskill for Katchafire's Slow-Burning and Tana Mitchell for Audiosauce's Continental Drift.

White has designed album artwork for many - from King Kapisi to Hayley Westenra - and says the album cover is what you think about when you put on some music.

"You think of the cover because you think of what that album looks like as a physical thing," says White, who has been known to buy an album for the cover alone.

But generally, album cover designers agree that if - or most likely when - downloading becomes the main way of distributing music, there will be less emphasis on album art.

But Kelvin Soh, who designed Che Fu's The Navigator and won an award for the cover design of Goodshirt's 2002 album, Good, says: "People still need the visual sense to be stimulated, and an album cover provides a context for the music."

Soh believes a good album cover must not only be unique, work as a marketing tool, and relate to the genre of music, but also add something more.

And some album covers can have a creative and cultural significance. "Like the Che Fu album, or the two Goodshirt albums, especially Good [which came with stickers], which have become classics," he says.

And Break It To Pieces is close to being a classic, too. The image looks particularly impressive on the cover of the vinyl version because of its size.

Right from the beginning Futialo wanted to use one of the well-known velvet paintings for the cover, and settled on a work by Charlie McPhee.

Co-designer Andy Morton says: "It sums up the kind of Pacific style. And it's anti-hip-hop in some senses too, because you look at it and you don't see it as an obvious, cliched hip-hop cover."

That's fitting, because Break It To Pieces - with its Samoan lyrics and pioneering beats and arrangements - isn't your typical hip-hop album.

The cover concept for Katchafire's album Slow Burning - the limited edition comes in a cardboard sleeve made up like a box of matches - was dreamed up by designers Chris Brunskill and Alana Broadhead.

"It was taken from how the band position themselves in that they're a semi-underground band who are becoming more well-known, and they've always had this kind of cheeky stance as to how they like to portray themselves," Brunskill says.

"And obviously there's the whole Katchafire pun in there, but it's a kind of tribute to their style, I guess."

Brunskill says the colours invoke twilight, with a "late-afternoon buzz" going on. "It's definitely an embodiment of the music itself and the whole chilled-out vibe that goes with Katchafire."