Obituary ~ Alex Steinweiss - credited with inventing record cover album art

see the covers
In the 1930s recorded music was sold in plain packaging, or record shop advertising 'bags'; sets of discs were also usually issued in plain albums.

In 1939, Alex Steinweiss was the first art director for Columbia Records, where he introduced a wider application of album covers and cover art. Steinweiss was active in record cover design from 1939 until 1973, when he semi-retired to devote himself to painting. By his own admission, he has designed roughly 2500 covers.

Steinweiss' career can be divided into roughly five periods. From 1939 to perhaps 1945, he designed all the covers for Columbia. During this period, he developed the entire graphic "language" of album design.

The second period is from 1945 to roughly 1950, during which he was no longer the sole designer for Columbia. He also began designing for other companies. This period is sometimes described as the "First Golden Age" of the album cover.

Steinweiss' signature font, the "Steinweiss scrawl," first appeared in roughly 1947. Steinweiss claims to have invented the LP cover, which first appeared in 1948.

Starting in around 1950, Steinweiss did the covers and record label for Remington, and began a more than 20 year association with both Decca and London Records. Like his earlier periods, most of his early 1950s designs are drawn, for Columbia, RCA, Remington, Decca and London. This is his third period, when he did drawing, lettering, and layout that was often brilliant but perhaps not as memorable as his late 1940s period. It was during this period that he collaborated with Margaret Bourke-White on a memorable series of covers for Columbia.

Starting in the mid-1950s, Steinweiss added photography to his palette. Steinweiss's photographic covers are remarkably distinctive. He utilized strange garish colors, odd lighting, and numerous visual puns and reference points. copy from wiki
on a similar tip ... Neil Fujita, (AIGA interview here)
From 1954, when he joined Columbia Records, Fujita and his design team built on the tradition of the celebrated designer Alex Steinweiss to match the innovative covers from dedicated jazz labels like Blue Note and Prestige.