May
13
2007
Explaining Clouds, The Wall, and Copycat Covers.
By Sruly
and has 3 comments.
As a Jewish music designer I’m faced with many constraints. I just wanted to voice some of my thoughts on the issue. I know that there are people who are very critical of Jewish CD covers and I wanted to sort of explain why some covers end up they way they do.
First and foremost, most artists do not want a picture of themselves on the cover. In the non Jewish or non religious music market, 75 percent of the covers in some way feature the artists. Since artists don’t want pictures of themselves on the cover that limits what a designer can do right from the start. (If you want to see one of my favorite covers that I did click here for a Chaim Dovid cover, that’s the benefit of being able to use a picture of the artist on the cover.) The remaining 25 percent of covers usually in some way feature the theme of the album. That is also a problem because for whatever it’s worth, most Jewish albums feature the same themes. Anyway you break it down, they are singing about being Jewish, singing about Hashem, singing about Jewish life, singing about being a Jew.
I take pride in what I do and I try very hard that when I create a designs its fresh and original. I will push as hard as I can that an album cover shouldn’t have the two most overused images in Jewish music. Clouds and the Kossel. I’ve joked about this on the Sameach Podcast and we even challenged our listeners to find and count as many albums with the Kossel on it as possible. One listener took up the challenge and found 52 (!) covers. You can see the full list at the website by clicking here. Just scroll to the bottom of the page for the full list.
The problem is that since Jewish singers are singing about Jewish things, they want their music associated with something holy. If they are singing about being Jewish and their love for Eretz Yisroel. They want the album to show the holiest site in Israel. When a singer makes an album he feels is inspirational, he associates clouds and sunsets and the sky as a visual representation of the feelings he/she want to convey through their music. If an artist tells me he wants clouds or kossel, I will do everything I can to tell them not to, but as with any job, you have to do what the client wants.
A big complaint about Jewish covers is that they copy other Jewish covers. This is sort of a pet peeve of mine and I really don’t think it’s so simple. The problem here is that since the Jewish market is so small, everyone sees every single cover. In other markets, if a person likes Jazz music more then anything else, he will not be familiar with covers from alternative rock CD’s.
Just because one Jewish album uses a road on the cover it does not mean that no one else can ever use a road again. Based on what I’ve already said earlier in this post, it’s hard enough to create an album cover without having a specific theme or using the artists image in some way. If every time an artist uses some distinct image and no one else can use it, your just going to run out of distinct images very quickly.I remember an earlier versions cover of a recent Jewish CD cover had a road sign on it similar to Journeys 4. It wasn’t being used in the same way and it didn’t even look like the same road sign. It was very cleverly being used in this cover.
There were other reasons it wasn’t used, but one of them was that “a road sign was already used for Journeys 4 and people are just gonna say we copied them.” It’s not what you use, it’s how you use it. That’s my motto when designing. I try to create fresh and original designs. I can buy stock photos and designs online like anyone else, but if you don’t use them the right way, then you’re not gonna get nothing original.
One of the recent CD’s I designed is a good example of the issues a designer is faced with. When I was designing Shabbos Get Ready. I believe it was Avi who actually brought this up first, but he asked me if I thought it was a problem that it had a road on it. I told him no, I said just because another CD uses a road doesn’t mean no one else can ever use a road. In fact there are many differences between Bein Kach’s road and this one.
We specifically didn’t want to go for a real looking road. We found a road that had a modern, artistic comic book look to it. This sort of animation is very popular right now in the design world. On the Bein Kach CD, the entire CD is JUST the actual road. No tree’s, no sunset, no animation, it’s just a real image of a road. The concept is that there is a double yellow line between the road. There are two directions. You can either go “this way or that way”, Bein Kach UBein Kach.
You have to look at the theme of the cover and what its trying to convey, not just that if there are similar objects on the cover.
That brings me to my next cover. The other cover I designed was Strings of the Soul. This is a Sameach production and is an album which we tried to use every string related musical instrument. We wanted the cover to have a trendy look and of course feature a guitar on the cover. If you went according to the rule that if one album has an object on it no other album could have it. Then no one else could ever have a guitar or a piano on a CD cover. Come on, it’s just not realistic. This guitar is actually not a stock photo. The entire picture is a picture of C Lanzbom playing a guitar. But we didn’t want to just feature a picture of the artist on the cover, we wanted the consumer to get the feeling that the focus of this album is on the string instruments.
To strengthen my point I went to Amazon.com and spent a mere ten minutes looking through non Jewish CD covers. I looked for covers with a raod on it and in those ten minutes I found 8 CD’s. All from very different genres.
In fact, if you really want to credit a musical group for using “the road” in it’s cover your gonna have to talk to a fairly popular quartet that went by the name of The Beatles.
This is really a topic that could be discussed much more at length, but for now this is a good place to start. All I would ask of people is that when you see a CD cover, just try to keep what I’ve written here in mind. There are many reasons a lot of Jewish covers look the same, but I truly believe all designers are trying their best to put their best creative foot forward.
It’s my solemn promise to you (bli Neder) that if I can help it I won’t ever use a stock photo of the Kossel or clouds. That much I can guarantee. But you might still see covers from me that have roads, road signs, cars, guitars, pianos, houses, doors, microphones and maybe even a mountain or two.