![]() Steinweiss' prolific output first slowed in 1943, when he was promoted to Columbia's advertising manager. In all, Steinweiss illustrated more than 2,500 record covers - most immediately recognizable is his work on the original Broadway cast recording of Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific, a cover that survived incarnations from LP to cassette to CD without change. Beginning with a collection of Rodgers & Hart stage hits, he drew on inspirations culled from French and German poster design to feature the composers' names spelled out in lights on a theater marquee - the approach quickly proved a hit with consumers, and across the hundreds of releases to follow, the artist honed a signature style all his own, characterized by geometric patterns, folk art abstraction, and an inimitable hand-drawn lettering approach soon dubbed the Steinweiss Scrawl. Where previously 78-rpm records were released in plain, simple pasteboard packages similar to photo albums, complete with basic layouts and fonts, Steinweiss proposed introducing original paintings and drawings more illustrative of the music within. After a two-year stint as assistant to Austrian-born graphic design pioneer Joseph Binder, in 1939 Steinweiss was named art director of the fledgling Columbia label. At 17, Steinweiss made his professional debut contributing illustration work to PM Magazine, and at 20 he graduated from New York City's renowned Parsons School of Design. Born March 24, 1917, in Brooklyn, Steinweiss attended Abraham Lincoln High School alongside future design innovators Gene Federico, Seymour Chwast, and William Taubin, collectively dubbed "the Art Squad" by visual arts teacher Leon Friend. Bibliotheca Universalis brings together nearly 100 of our all-time favorite titles in a neat new format so you can curate your own affordable library of art, anthropology, and aphrodisia.During his storied stint as Columbia Records' art director, Alex Steinweiss transformed the packaging and presentation of recorded music, pioneering the LP cover and developing a graphic language that designers still employ to this day. The book includes Steinweiss’s personal recollections and ephemera from an epic career, as well as insightful essays by three-time Grammy Award–winning art director/designer Kevin Reagan and graphic design historian Steven Heller.īibliotheca Universalis- Compact cultural companions celebrating the eclectic TASCHEN universe at an unbeatable, democratic price! Since we started our work as cultural archaeologists in 1980, the name TASCHEN has become synonymous with accessible, open-minded publishing. His daring designs, gathered here in all their bright combinations of bold typography with modern, elegant illustration, revolutionized the way music was sold. ![]() ![]() Over the next three decades, Steinweiss made thousands of original artworks for classical, jazz, and popular record covers for Columbia, Decca, London, and Everest as well as logos, labels, advertising material, even his own typeface, the Steinweiss Scrawl. In 1940, as Columbia Records’ young new art director, he pitched an idea: why not replace the standard plain brown wrapper with an eye-catching illustration? The company took a chance, and within months its record sales increased by over 800 percent. I wanted people to look at the artwork and hear the music.” ―Alex SteinweissĪlex Steinweiss (1917–2011) invented the album cover as we know it. “I love music so much and I had such ambition that I was willing to go way beyond what the hell they paid me for.
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