Covered! was a great book project to work on, combining design and record sleeves. What wasn’t to like? Basically the sleeve collection was devoted to covers which referenced more famous sleeves, often by bigger bands. This might be by way of homage, or simply poking fun or taking the michael. So it was often a real laugh seeing some of these which doing the layouts.
The inside design was a basic grid set up. I figured most people buying this would be record collectors and would know the original sleeve being referred to, so I showed that at a smaller size, then grouped the copy covers around it. This also meant I could cram more in! Each was then researched to give a few lines of text, with credits where known. A couple of spreads are shown below.
The front cover was more difficult as it was not an easy book to sum up in a few words. So it felt as if the best way was to portray a selection of a few of the most obvious covers and copies to get the idea across as quickly as possible. This in turn suggested a chess board style grid.
My first attempt (top) had half a dozen larger covers then a lot of smaller ones under the main title, which was run at 90 degrees. These main cover choices I stuck with but took the smaller ones out and placed the title horizontally on the first revision, running it off the sides of the cover for the second version (above). The strap line I tinted back to stop it taking over, and put a shadow beneath both to help the text stand out. I added some reversed out sleeves to fill out the sides but wasn’t happy with that, so later replaced these with another half dozen spoofs of covers which I felt people would recognise, despite them not being the originals or being fully visible. This became the final design.
Happily most reviewers (and readers!) really got the book, and it received some very good reviews.
Links • some copies of the book are still available at the publisher’s web shop.
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