Sqwink Album Art Blog

I must admit, I’ve heard very little of British Sea Power in general. A couple of weeks ago, I heard a track from the Brit-bands’ new album Do You Like Rock Musicon the Zane Lowe BBC Radio show. I thought it was quite good, but let’s not stray…this post is about the album artwork rather than the sound of music…

When I saw this cover art on iTunes earlier today, I was astounded! The imagery just gripped me instantly, and stood out from the crowd of album covers that dotted my Mac screen.

For me, the correlation between the music and artwork is quite evident; they create quite an emotional attachment to each other. The whole piece looks like paint on rusted metal, and yeah, the kind you’d possible find at sea (but I’m not really sure that connection is really intended).

I’m not going to give a more detailed, in depth review on this new British Sea Power…well, masterpiece, as I can’t really say much more than I really like it! The color, the connection, the ‘Plus’ graphic…and the rust effect - it blows me away!

It just goes to show the importance of good album artwork. As stated, I’ve heard one track, but now I may buy it because of the quality of the artwork and the positive message it conveys about the band. In this case, it’s not just the power of Music - it’s the Power of Rust!

Anyone who’s either an avid fan of Radiohead or just an occasional listener will not be at all shocked by their latest album artwork for In Rainbows.

Im not quite sure what the background image is, nor what it’s of (although it does look like a child in the womb). The album cover has got the whole typeface “thought-provoking-type-setting” thing going on as well.

It reminds me of the Manic Street Preachers cover art for “Know Your Enemy” - and Garbage used similar typography for their 2005 album “Bleed Like Me“. It seems to me that there’s a sort of typography trend going at the moment geared towards this style.

The one thing the viewer can directly relate to, though, is the fact that it’s called In Rainbows…and the RADIO_HEAD & IN RAINBOWS type is multi-colored! Overall though, this album cover is not by any means great because of the image, rather it’s great because it represents Radioheads’ progressive music, which both matures and transcends into varied sounds and genres on every album release. For this, a 7/10 rating does the job justice.

Last year, I redesigned my newly-designed CSS Sqwink site. I used an Apple G5, like designers do, to hand-code it. The only thing was, throughout the entire process, I wanted to test it on various PC browsers, as I was using a Mac. I’ve read online that many designers’ buy PC’s for emulation purposes, so I bought an older PC laptop in order to test it in IE6.

Whilst testing, it occurred to me that I need to test it on IE7 and Mozilla Firefox browsers for PC’s also. Not been a PC person, I wasn’t prepared to start buying more equipment just for site testing, nor partition drives for multiple browser installs. I also didn’t want to shell out for a Mac ‘Virtual Windows’.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I was searching the web one day soon after, and discovered the most amazing tool - BrowserShots.org (screen shot below). The concept of this site is really quite simple. You just input your site URL in the top box and select different browsers for Linux, Windows and Mac. Each selection is effectively a request to see a screenshot of your site - that’s the money-saving beauty of this service! You submit and your site URL is added to a list until these ‘BrowserShots’ are available online for you to browse at your leisure.

The benefits of BrowserShots is that you can see multiple shots of what your site looks like not just in various browsers on 3 platforms, but various versions of these browsers too! So, you don’t need to be partitioning 4 PC’s or nipping over to a friends house to see your CSS site in all its’ glory. Obviously, there’s a downside to this…you only see what your site LOOKS like, not how it functions - and to see every page, you have to re-submit each one.

All-in-all though, BrowserShots saves much time, money and effort when developing and testing your CSS masterpiece. I hope this article helps you in your designs. Any questions or comments are welcome…