I’ve always been a sucker for a well designed album cover. With the growing popularity of MP3s, iPods, and electronic distribution of music, one of the things I fear might go away is the art accompanying the songs.

And perhaps, that is one of the things that can save it.

Will CDs be around ten years from now? Will the idea of having a music collection stored on your computing device be commonplace?

There have been a lot of wonderful pieces of artwork accompanying music from days on vinyl to today’s CDs. A Design Observer article, Fresh Fruit in Foreign Places takes a look at some of the art coming out on independent label CDs in Europe for inspiration, and the sheer delight of doing so.

Can cover art sell CDs? Maybe. I like the approach Get Me Music takes on their CD Artwork Gallery, where they display 15 random covers, and you can refresh the screen to see 15 new ones, or click on one of the covers to hear some of the music that goes with it.

I think that it can. But then, I remember the days of vinyl records, and excitedly stopping by one of my local record stores every week to see their wall long display of new album covers. There was more than one disk that I purchased unlistened to just because of the allure of the cover.

But not all cover art that accompanies music has been that great, and one of the things I think was lost when CDs replaced LPs as the public’s format of choice for music was that the size of the container shrank. A nice look at some design considerations on the switch to smaller CDs from Carol Wright, in more detail: CD packaging design: Love ‘em and read ‘em.

The article originally appeared six years ago, but the author notes that she does continually revise it. I wonder if it will become moot, and we will see visual art disappear from our music as it sheds packaging, and becomes more easily distributed online. Maybe.

Then again, maybe we will see graphics to go with those sounds, and the art will fill our screens, instead of lining our shelves.