Hardformat - Reaching for the sublime in music design.

Hardformat - a super fabulous website featuring outstanding music-related design - more specifically really elaborate packaging, which if you are anything like us, is something to really geek out about.

From their "About" page:

It seems like everybody’s talking about the end of physical music media. Who knows whether they’re right or not, but Hard Format is a little place we’ve set up to celebrate our love of brilliant music-related design. That means we’re going to focus on records, CDs, cassettes and their like. However, Hard Format isn’t intended to become a dusty museum devoted exclusively to past glories, though there’ll certainly be some of that, we also want to highlight the brilliant new design work being produced right now. In fact, we’re not setting ourselves up to supply a canon of classic design - this is a place where we record stuff we like, if you want yet another reproduction of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band there are enough ‘Greatest album covers of all time’ books out there already.

Oh and who knows, perhaps at some point in the future we may even need to set up a parallel site to celebrate brilliant virtual design…

Even More Album and Design Fun

Sleevage is likely to appeal to anyone with the slightest interest in album covers as well as full blown aficionados. From the LP’s of the 60’s to the digital artworks of now. It’s still a work in progress but there’s a wealth of album covers listed by artists and design studio on their site. When possible they try to get a bit of background on each cover and if possible some early working comps, giving insight into the creation of many iconic covers.

They are currently in BETA release (that’s why a few things are still rough) and they’re also looking for writers who want to regularly submit to Sleevage in exchange for free CD’s and concert tickets. If that sounds like something you want to do then contact them.