Alex Steinweiss: The Inventor of the Record Cover

“His covers were like a wink.” 

When Alex Steinweiss first began his career as an art director at Columbia Records, record albums were like dusty, leathery tombstones that only had the composer’s name engraved with gold. Steinweiss’s 800+ covers changed the way consumers chose records off of the shelves by using them to tell beautiful stories. This project consists of a poster, booklet, and mobile experience that summarizes my admiration and respect for Alex’s pioneering career.

CHALLENGES

Designing for someone who has had very varied visual styles and bold color combos was a big challenge. Because it felt disingenuous to only show his illustrations or only his collage work, I did my best to showcase all different styles throughout the different pages.

In the final two spreads, I created a timeline following Alex’s initials (A.S.) that organized his design repetoire, from high school projects to his clay vessels. I wanted to show that Alex’s spirit of creating new things and trying out new techniques was an experience that continued after his professional career and much into the rest of his life. As an appropriate ending to this booklet, I chose a sweet photo of Alex with his wife Blanche, both joyfully coming back from their first trip to Europe.

REFLECTION

Throughout this project, I found some incredible jazz musicians to add to my midnight playlists. But on a more serious note, I learned about Alex’s career and the somewhat unfortunate progression of the music industry switching from illustrative to photographic record covers. The revolutionary CD cases were, in Alex’s opinion, too small of a surface to work on.

Alex’s story taught me the inevitability of shifting tastes and new technology, but he also helped me fall in love with the small period of time between the 140s-1960s where people could really SEE music for the first time.

Next Project: Singapore SEGD Conference 2022