I think that SOTT has without a doubt the best sleeve of all the albums with Grafitti Bridge and New Power Soul the worst.
WHAT DO U THINK?

Worst:

Emancipation
NPS
P.O.O.S

Best:
Controversy
Purple Rain
Sign O The Times
Rainbow Children

this is the best album cover...

DavidEye said:

this is the worst album cover...

DavidEye said:

they did a good job of making it look like a bootleg, though.

Best:
"Black" ("How much more black? None. None more black.")
"Sign O The Times"
"Purple Rain" (I like the flowers!)
"ATWIAD"

Worst:
"Musicology"
"Prince"
"Lovesexy"
"NPS"
"Emancipation" (looks awful, sounds worse)

DavidEye said:

I've always thought that was one of the worst covers.
(his face is so airbrushed he's gone from being black to being orange!)

Good...
Sign O' The Times
Dirty Mind
Around The World In A Day

Bad...
Emancipation
Musicology
Rave Un2 The Joy Fantastic

i think that the overall feel of his album covers have declined since the mid-90s, and especially over the past few years. musicology was a disappointment for me, though i'll give some credit for the liner notes booklet design...there were some fun things going on with it. the cover, though...oy.

i wish the folks at NPG would stop worrying so much about what they can do with their computers and how they can custom cut their digipack designs or whatever the heck it is they get all excited about, and put more energy into just creating strong, funky, iconic images that stand out from all the other albums littering up the wrecka stow. get back to the customized fonts, like with SOTT and purple rain and dirty mind. give these albums a personality again. when i think of 1999 or controversy, i get very specific mental images - colors, shapes, feelings of how a room would look if it were representative of that album. didn't feel that way so much about musicology or TRC, and i felt like the design of ONA live was substandard to a lot of live bootleg cover art i've seen. TRC was very disappointing to me because, yes, it's a nice painting, but it's someone else's image and someone else's message, and it wasn't an effective PRINCE-related image to me, especially when i'd see prints of that painting hanging in frame shop windows around chicago.

the blurry, off-kilter cover of SOTT was inspired. the mutant prince creature joined at the bellybutton on the cover of parade was inspired. the doodle cover of 1999 - inspired. the painting for ATWIAD - totally inspired. lovesexy? downright iconic. heck, the photo on the cover of musicology had a lot of promise - all they needed to do was pick out a simpler/bolder/less ugly font and get rid of that stock-looking ivy/concrete background, and voila. brilliant cover art. but no. it can't be that simple. gotta photoshop the hell out of it and slap on some county-fair lookin' font. why?! ugh. frustrating.

i still say he should seek out a fan who does awesome art stuff to do his cover art...the stuff from the '80s was boss, man. what the hell happened, computers and photoshop totally came into view and the paisley park art department got totally lazy?

and i still wouldn't mind seeing another self-made cover, ala 1999. doodles are fine, but i wanna see what he's really capable of.

Handclapsfingasnapz said:

i would LOVE to see another prince-designed album cover, even if it IS just doodles. i used to stare at 1999 like crazy, just trying to find new hidden images he mighta hid in the scrawls...and i was pleased as punch when he did more doodling for the gett off single, crude as it was. something tells me he's just really not that interested in the whole design identity thing anymore - that he's more about just the music, and the experience of playing it and being who he is, and the persona he's cultivated over all these years isn't as important in terms of keeping it fresh and shiny and challenging. i hope i'm way off base with that. but in a way, he's earned the right to slack, i guess.

as for fans doing his art, i think that's a fabulous idea. there were some fan-created covers for musicology posted on the org last year that blew the official cover art out of the water. i'd love it if NPGMC held a contest where they supplied the title of the album and a general 'feel' they're looking for, and maybe a picture of prince they'd want on the cover...folks could submit their designs, and the best four out of all the submissions would go to another level of competition where they're given all the liner note and track info, and they have to design the whole package - best one out of the four gets the gig. i guarantee he'd be pleased with the results.

Best: Sign O The Times



I love the colors. I love the clutter, the hodgepodge of musical instruments and neon signs and disembodied cars. A whole bunch of unconnected items that come together to form one solid vision. And Prince is half on, half off, out of focus, as if to say that it is the vision and not the man that is important. The album itself is a hodgepodge of different styles, from rap to rock to whatever the hell Dorothy Parker is but it all comes together beautifully into one unified vision statement. The cover is perfect.


Worst: Chaos and Disorder




The cover, like the album, is a mess. There is a difference between a powerful collage and a bunch of crap thrown together by a rock star at his ultimate spoiled bratness. We get a little bit of Prince's angry eye and the rest is just brutal to look at. As bad as the cover is, the liner notes inside are even uglier. A low point for the man, as he became so obsessed with one upping WB that he forgot about the people whose devotion (and wallets) got him to that position where he could release whatever castoffs he wanted to and wrap it in a godawful spiteful cover.

Anxiety said:

BEST:

Sign 'O' The Times
Parade
Lovesexy
Dirty Mind
1999


WORST:

C & D
Rave
Emancipation

Best: LoveSexy and Diamonds & Pearls






worst: The Vault...Old Friends for Sale (looks so gloomy )

WOOF WOOF WOOF GRRRR

Butcherdog says - he always felt that the Graffiti Bridge album cover was a rip of miles Davis Bitches Brew album Artwork

Best-Lovesexy! Man I had never seen a man expose so much of his body-and i liked how he didn't have his name or album title on it-just the picture

Worst-1999 I never liked it.

My favorite is 'Sign', perfectly matches the music inside. One of the last great "Vinyl" covers.

Second comes Around the World in A day, the vinyversion, which you could fould out, this scene with all the figures on the front (and the female-body contoured landscape in the background), and on the inside sleeve, the colourfull, serene, landscape....

Prince-fans born in the cd-era missed a lot by not seeing that original sleeve

Worst cd-covers

No 1. Emancipation...the outside cover is allready so-so, but the inside booklet is pure horror, coulours that dont match, very ugly graphic work, utterly unattrictive.

No 2. Chaos and disorder: well, it does reflect te lyrics of the songs, but somehow it seems like an easy, quick photoshop-collage

No 3. New Power Soul - from what i remember (i never bought this cd, because of the crap quality of the music on it) Prince took his coloured pencils and created an amateurish lookig sleeve

TheFrog said:

What's POOS?

He has excellent album covers. I even like Chaos and Disorder's cover a lot.

My favs are:
Purple Rain
ATWIAD
Graffiti Bridge
D&P
Symbol
Hits/B-Sides

The worst:
Batman
Emancipation

and his singles have awesome covers as well.

My fave is SOTT...that cover is timeless. I love TRC and Around the world in a day too.
Graffiti Bridge and Prince are the worst. Batman doesnt count...it was the movie design. It had nothing to do with Prince.

Around the World in a Day is my favorite of all of Prince's album covers. It's so intriguing and colorful. I also like the overall cover/booklet package of Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic. It's just so vivid and modern looking.


As for the worst, Emancipation, far and away. Nothing redeeming about that one.
[Edited 4/24/05 17:39pm]

BEST

DIRTY MIND
CONTROVERSY
PURPLE RAIN
1999

WORST

LOVESEXY
RAVE

Best:

Prince
Dirty Mind
Controversy
Purple Rain
Parade
SOTT
Diamonds and Pearls
Musicolgy

Worst:

For You
Around in a Day

From a thread I started a couple months ago about album art:

For You - Cool dust cover and groovy 1978 feel...for what it was and when it was made, I give it credit.

Prince - Blah. Where did they shoot that photo, the local newsroom where they do the weather on the blue screen? Failing grade, sorry.

Dirty Mind - Frickin' right on.

Controversy - A bit goofy but appropriate for the album. I say "good" despite the fact that he's never looked more like Morris Day than in that cover photo.

1999 - Way cool hand-drawn art from Prince himself.

Purple Rain - A-OK. I would guess that anyone who is a music fan of the 80s could describe this album cover for you without much trouble.

Around the World in a Day - Possibly the most fitting album cover art ever for a Prince album. Use of sections of the large painting on the single LPs was really cool. Could be Prince's "Abbey Road."

Parade - I could do without the shot of his flathead screwdriver bellybutton, but it's elegant and appropriate for the UTCM soundtrack.

SOTT - In a head-to-head race with ATWIAD for the most appropriate and beautiful cover art for a Prince album.

Lovesexy - Not a fan of naked unibrow men, but okay -- it's all about rebirth, and our little man looks like he's on those flowers, especially considering we're talking about pre-Photoshop days here. Good cover.

Batman - Doesn't even count as a Prince album cover.

Graffiti Bridge - The worst P album cover art since his self-titled LP. Looks like a photo collage project from grade school. The hand-lettering by Margo Chase is cool, but it's lost in all the other crap. Is that a frickin' floating hand for Pete's sake?

Diamonds and Pearls - Hologram was inventive and got lots of attention. For that I say "good job."

0(+> - The cheese factory is open for business again. What high school theatre did they get the props from for the video for 7?

The Hits/B-Sides - Nice duotone photography. Simple and cool.

Come - Sorry, not a fan of that. Blame it on the hair and the mustache that practically wraps around the back of his head.

The Gold Experience - Aside from the fact that it looks like they just didn't know what the hell to do with the symbol besides but a black drop shadow the size of Montana on it, I think it was well done. Nice photography treatments.

Chaos and Disorder - Well, the art fits the album, but the back cover is better than the front, I think. The WB logo in the tear...a little silly.

Emancipation - *some* of the photo illustrations are cool, but not most. The last spread of the lyric book would have made a better cover.

The Vault - Bad on purpose, I do believe.

Crystal Ball - It was supposed to look like a bootleg, but it was way worse.

New Power Soul - I've seen better drawings on the photos of the models you see in the lipstick aisle of the grocery store.

Rave - The blue foil was actually very cool. The outfit and the hair were anything but.

TRC - Cool and appropriate.

NEWS - The unique packaging saves the day -- I say cool.

Musicology - The Musicology CD art was bad. Real bad.

The digipak format does have a more "friendly," "earthy" feel than a standard plastic jewel case...but I will say this -- at least the digipak for TRC and NEWS included a method to close and seal the packaging. With Musicology, you just hope it stays shut and the CD booklet doesn't fall out.

Then there's the screenprinting on the CD -- looks very cheaply done at a really low line screen, and the cream-ish color from the album cover drifts towards pink on the CD screenprinting, too.

Typestyler went out of fashion in 1989 -- but the "musicology" text on the album cover looks like it's been revived from Macintosh System 6.

The lyric book...don't even get me started. The first page or two uses the Egyptian-looking Herculanum typeface for the lyrics, then it changes to an extended version of crappy Helvetica or Arial and just looks like a giant mistake. And could the band look any more like stuffed corpses in the group shot? Prince esta muerto...sure looks like it. Thankfully, with a digipak that doesn't close and has no pocket, the chances of losing the booklet altogether are considerably higher.

Worst:
NEWS

Best:
Diamonds and Pearls(hologram)

Anxiety said:

Well, you have to think NPG is his own record label!?

Best: Black Album.

Worst: Lovesexy, because it makes me feel uncomfortable.

Best - Parade - sleek, stylish, minimalist & beautiful. (this was the mid-eighties remember)

Worst - Graffiti Bridge - vile (and why did Warners make it the cover of the Prince DVD Collection? Why!!!???)