Tuesday 2 May 2006

Visionary #11: Black or White

Pleasing geometric shapes on this one.

Thursday 27 April 2006

Berman, The Set

In recognition of podsafe group Berman's latest release, here are all their covers.

Saturday 22 April 2006

Visionaries #9 & #10

Bad singles continue. That makes 5 so far!

Saturday 15 April 2006

Visionary #8: Dirty Diana

Cool '80s boots.

Sunday 2 April 2006

Gorillaz: Demon Days Live

Just bought this today. You've got two versions of the cover here. The first is the full DVD size. The second has been cropped down to 1000 x 1000 square. You've got the option. The full size has critiques that aren't strictly speaking part of the artwork. The cropped size is good for the iPod if you rip the audio or video.

Saturday 1 April 2006

Visionary #7

The collection continues with rimlit romance.

Tuesday 28 March 2006

Bad!

Here is Michael Jackson's Visionary single #6: Bad. For some reason here in Australia it didn't come out last week, thus the delay.

Saturday 18 March 2006

Budget Blowout!

Michael Jackson has started releasing a collector's delight on a weekly basis: Dual Disc singles containing the original single and a remix or 12" version on the CD side and the associated video on the DVD side. The packaging is beautiful—vinyl single replica card sleeves with cardboard inner sleeves, all in a classy box which came with the first in the series, Thriller.

5 of 20 have been released so far. I've got all 5 for you here if you've been lucky enough to collect them.

As soon as I get new ones I will release them so you can keep up to date.

Tip for those of you who have the capability to rip the DVD for use on the 5th-generation iPod: By default, iTunes looks a few seconds into a video and uses that frame as the album art. It's nicer to see proper album covers in the thumbnail view in the Video source list. It also displays this artwork if you play the video as an audio file on the iPod or if you play video through a TV.

There is a trick to assigning album art to videos. If you drag an image file to the artwork pane in iTunes, it will attach it as a second image but won't replace the default. You have to select the video, Get Info, click the Artwork tab, delete the default art, then drag the image file to the artwork field. This is a little annoying but the effect is well worth the effort.

Saturday 18 March 2006

Gilmy Goodness

David Gilmour has released his third studio album after a gap of 12 years! To commemorate this release, I've upsized his other two covers. I've created two versions of On an Island: one is the full cover with the lovely cloth binding on the spine and for the one here, I cut off the spine to make it square. iPods and Front Row prefer square covers. The iPod shrinks landscapes and Front Row squashes them horizontally.

The colour of On an Island looks a bit muted, but this is really what it looks like. The classy roughish paper surface scatters light.

Tuesday 28 February 2006

Podsafe Artists

It's about time I featured podsafe artists. Here are two of the best in the business.

The Summertime Remix for Brother Love is a cover I constructed from website elements. It's intended to go with the remix available from his website. I could only make it a 400 x 400 I'm afraid.

In celebration of Matthew Ebel's CD release, here is the cover in all its glory.

Sunday 26 February 2006

Wolfmother: A Study in Retro

Not only is this band's sound retro, but so is their album art. Beautiful Sci-Fi/Fantasy style.

The Dimensions cover shown here is a US print, an almost identical mirror-image of Mind's Eye/Woman, but there are some minor changes and some elements are embossed.

Wednesday 28 December 2005

Great Changes Afoot

It's been a long time since I last did an update and a major change in the way iTunes handles artwork has occurred in that time.

It used to be that iTunes copied music across to the iPod without modifying the artwork in any way. This forced me to keep the file resolution, and thus file size, down so as not to fill up an iPod needlessly. After all, artwork is completely useless on a black-and-white iPod and is resized on the fly for colour iPods.

That is until a recent update. Now iTunes optimises artwork when copying files to the iPod. It creates 2 versions from the original image—a thumbnail for the Now Playing screen and a larger one for the full-screen art view—vastly reducing iPod image file sizes.

This means great things for artwork in iTunes. It now doesn't matter how big the original art is, it will never overly tax an iPod's storage capacity. High-quality artwork is more enjoyable in media-centre applications such as Apple's Front Row and the open-source iTheater.

In light of this, I am pleased to announce the move toward the 1000-pixel standard for artwork on Album-Art.net. From this point forward, new artwork released will be in this size. To commemorate the occasion, I am proud to release my favourite cover of all time, ZZ Top's Afterburner. A lot of loving hand editing went into restoring this masterpiece. Enjoy and look forward to more 1000-pixel art in the new year.