While the golden age of records may never be recreated, the importance of album art has never diminished. Capturing a musician's talent visually is an essential part of their branding successs. Behind the album features several designers and their process for creating covers, posters, lyric books, and all the packaging essentials for top musicians. Many innovative designs from the past and recent times give the reader an idea of what is possible within the art of music packaging design.

Focuses on the stories behind 100 of the most memorable album covers in the history of rock and roll music, tracing the history of rock music and culture from Elvis to Blur. The collection has been personally selected by Storm Thorgerson, known for his work on Pink Floyd album covers.

Iron Maiden are without one of heavy metal's most successful indie bands. From their first album in 1980 they have led the way in the New Wave of British Heavy Metal with Billboard pointing out they have 'always been an underground attraction'. Though other pioneering peers like Metallica have been around on the scene just as long provided their own innovations metal and advanced the genre to a mainstream level, it was Iron Maiden who have been the fans' favourites. Their crossover to chart success showed many bands how it could be done. They were key in getting heavy metal to be accepted as a credible genre. With an impressive catalogue of 15 studio albums spread over 20 years including Iron Maiden (1980), The Number of the Beast (1982), Seventh Son of a Seventh Son and The Final Frontier (2010), their influence speaks for itself. For the first time ever, the writing and recording of such iconic hits as 'The Number of the Beast', 'Flight of Icarus', 'Two Minutes to Midnight', 'Wasted Years', 'Can I Play with Madness' and 'Hallowed Be Thy Name' are explored in-depth. This book takes you into the studio with a band who show no sign of slowing down and whose influence can still be heard in a thousand metal bands today.

A starkly beautiful, wordless graphic novel about the end of the world by the cult artist and longtime Radiohead collaborator. A wild seascape, a distant island, a full moon. Gradually the island grows nearer until we land on a primeval wilderness, rich in vegetation and huge, strange beasts. Time passes and man appears, with clubs, with spears, with crueler weapons still—and things do not go well for the wilderness. Civilization rises as towers of stone and metal and smoke choke the undergrowth and the creatures that once moved through it. This is not a happy story, and it will not have a happy ending. Working in his distinctive, monochromatic linocut style, Stanley Donwood achieves with his art what words cannot convey, carving out a mesmerizing, stark parable of environmental disaster and the end of civilization.

Grafikdesigner lieben Musik. Das zeigt nicht zuletzt die große Begeisterung der Leser des Typografie-Magazins „Slanted" für die Rubrik „Typo Lyrics", in der Gestalter Musik mithilfe von Schrift ganz neu interpretieren. Für die gleichnamige Publikation haben sich renommierte Grafikdesigner wie Fons Hickmann sowie junge Talente aus der ganzen Welt von Songtexten zu innovativen Font-Designs inspirieren lassen. Entstanden ist eine Sammlung faszinierender Visuals – „Schriftbilder", die zeitgenössische Fonts auf eine etwas andere Weise präsentieren. Das außergewöhnliche Zusammenspiel von Schriftgestaltung und Musik macht die Fonts lebendig und bringt sie regelrecht zum Tanzen. Im Gegensatz zu klassischen Musterbüchern oder Schriftenfächern wird so ein besonderer, emotionaler Zugang zur Typografie geschaffen, der das große Ausdruckspotenzial von Schriften deutlich macht. Analog zur traditionellen Schriftklassifikation gliedert sich das Buch in elf Kapitel, die sich jeweils mit einer Schriftfamilie und Songtexten einer bestimmten Musikrichtung auseinandersetzen.

Beyond Symbolism and Surrealism sheds light on the oeuvre of Alexei Remizov (1877-1957), a great modernist eccentric who has remained largely unknown to Western audiences. Although his original prose garnered him early acclaim and has since entered the Russian literary canon, Remizov's artistic capacity was fully realized only after his experimentation with words and images culminated in a writing process that relies as much on drawing as it does on language. --