Beatles album covers 1960's - Pam

During the 1960’s The Beatles produced such inspiring album covers that their designs continued to be imitated over the years by many different artists ranging from The Simpsons through to The Red Hot Chilli Peppers. Artists such as the creators of The Simpsons mimicked the album cover for the Abbey Road album cover along with the release of The Simpsons music that was homage to the Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club band cover.As technology progressed during the 1960’s with the introduction of colour television and photography, so did the spirit of exploration and experimentation of the graphics used on album covers. The creative designs of The Beatles album covers acted as a kind of scrapbook for their myth making career that gave an insight to their culture.

The 1967’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was a comically hallucinogenic landscape of Pepperland that typifies the era of that time. Designer Peter Blake (recognised for this fine art contribution and rising fame in the pop art movement) created a colourful collage of several of the band members heroes and influences such as Ghandi and Alistair Crowley. The idea of the front row was to create a three dimensional image leading into a two dimensional flat frame placement of the objects They were produced as life sized cardboard models and were blown up to specifications and tinted with colour by hand then glued onto hardboard sheets. These designs contained the pop art and psychedelic art movements of that time however was an original style not yet done for the pop rock scene for album covers.Illustrated album cover for the Revolver album was created by artist friend Klaus Voorman. It included part line drawings and part collage that also included photographs. He also cleverly incorporated a photograph of himself along with his name in the hair of George Harrison.The design used on the album cover for Yellow submarine (by Heinz Edelmann) was solely based upon the animated film, and the artwork style is thought to resemble acid trips, flower power style pop art also seen with the type of font they have used. The concept of the covers artwork involves the four band members going on an epic and colourful journey to save Pepperland. The environment showed a style of abstract illustrations that were playful and experimental that mirrored the songs of The Beatles.


http://www.beatlebay.com/The_Beatles.htm

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/23/arts/design/23edelmann.html

http://www.norwegianwood.org/beatles/english/albumcovers9.html

http://blogs.creativecow.net/blog/865/creative-album-cover-design-a-showcase-of-beatles-albums

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolver_(album)