All of us owe a hearty thank you to Alex Steinweiss and his contributions to album cover art and music. Can you imagine no art work accompanying a vinyl record? I can’t, and it is a great thing that Alex Steinweiss couldn’t either. At age 23, the “Godfather” of album cover art, Alex Steinweiss accepted a job to design promotional materials for Columbia Records. What would happen next would revolutionize the music industry, specifically vinyl records, when he invented the illustrated album cover. A rather obvious, but brilliant, idea was to create a titillating graphic package that would, not only protect the record, but advertise the artist and the music contained therein (prior to this, records were sold in plain, undecorated wrappers). “Records used to be relegated to the back of the stores that sold refrigerators and stoves. You’d go to the counter and ask for the title you wanted,” recalled Steinweiss. “I needed to shake up the industry, we had to do something like European poster art to draw the attention of the buyer.”
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And “shake up the industry” is just what Steinweiss did. Starting in 1939 with his first covers, for a collection of Rodgers & Hart’s Musical Hits, Columbia executives saw the sales of the illustrated albums skyrocket, including one by more than eight hundred percent. Soon after that 78 rpm albums were adorned with decorated covers and displayed in store windows.
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A new medium was born, album cover art became the norm and attracted established artists and inspired many new artists to enter the arena. It allowed the record company and the artist to promote a visual image and identity with the music.
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- So who was Alex Steinweiss? Let’s explore his life in detail. Steinweiss grew up in Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach area and he attended the Abraham Lincoln High School from 1930-1934 and that is where he started his graphic designing career. In a program taught by Leon Friend, Steinweiss and his classmates were known as the “Art Squad,” designing school publications, posters and signs. When he was seventeen, Steinweiss’ work was showcased in PM Magazine. He received a scholarship to Parsons School of Art and graduated in 1937. His first job was as an assistant to Joseph Binder, a position that lasted almost three years, before receiving a call about a new position at the newly formed Columbia Records. He designed all the covers for Columbia between 1939 and 1945, a period in which he developed and honed the graphic art of album cover design. In the period between 1945 to roughly 1950, he still did cover design for Columbia, but he was not the sole designer. He also began “freelancing” and began designing covers for other record companies.
- As a freelance designer with such record labels as RCA, Decca, London and Everest, Steinweiss was considered peerless. Using his own unique format of blending eye-catching illustrations, vivid color schemes and playful typography, Steinweiss created album covers for such musical greats as Louis Armstrong, Bela Bartok, Count Basie, Leonard Bernstein, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Kate Smith and many others.