The importance of album art

Yesterday we were happy to learn that Ruth Moody’s solo album The Garden received the award for “Best CD/Vinyl album cover illustration for a solo recording” from Canada’s visual communications magazine Applied Arts. The beautiful and intricate cover illustration and design was done by Ron Sawchuk who has also been the mastermind behind The Wailin’ Jennys’ album covers.

It’s good to see that there are still folks out there that appreciate good album cover art. In a time when most covers are reduced to the size of a thumbnail, details become lost, and the artform of the cover seems less important. It would be easy to brush off this importance with a cynical grumble, but to do that is foolish. In some ways, the cover art is more important than ever now, even with the growth of the digital music world.

Whether you purchase vinyl, cassette (they are still being produced), CDs, or digital the cover is the first thing you see. It may not be the determining factor on whether you buy an album or not, but it can certainly determine whether some one even picks up your album to look at it or not. Maybe you’re cruising the racks at your local music shop and you reach for an unfamiliar album solely because you think its cover looks cool. Or maybe you even skipped over a CD or two because it didn’t catch your eye. And now with the resurgence of vinyl a great cover not only catches your eye, but it slaps you across the face.

In an industry that is in constant flux, we take great care and pride not only in the music we put out, but also in the packaging. We see it as part of an art form unto itself. To toot our own horn a little, we’ve been pretty lucky to have put out some great album covers over the years. Check out some of our more recent covers! You can see more great covers in our on-line store at www.redhouserecords.com.