Album Cover Bank Case Study

The Album Cover Bank is a digital archive holding over 5,300 Nigerian album covers, dating back to the 1950s. The project first launched in 2021 during my time at Independent Arts (formerly wuruwuru) as an exploration of how graphic design trends in Nigerian pop culture have influenced the nation’s music over the decades. Over time, it evolved into an initiative to spotlight cover designers as vital cultural contributors and establish this archive as the go-to resource for discovering Nigerian cover artists.

Initially, the project aimed to explore the history of Afrobeat in Nigeria. However, during our desk research, we realized the scope was too broad, and narrowed our focus to curating a database of Nigerian album cover art as a way to preserve their stories and celebrate the artists behind them. This direction felt especially important as we found that album cover artists in Nigeria don't get enough credit or acknowledgment for their work.

Dating back to the era of vinyl records, cassettes, and CDs, and now in the age of streaming, album covers have always played a pivotal role in shaping how music is represented. Beyond being mere visual representations, album covers often become cultural touchstones, capturing the aesthetics and spirit of their time.

In the digital world, their role has evolved further, and people now showcase their music tastes by sharing screenshots of songs or album covers on social media, or even displaying their favorite album art as prints on their walls.

Project Goal

Over time, the goals of the project have evolved to focus on:

Creating a functional and user-friendly website to browse the database of covers, which also serves as an online portfolio for album cover artists.
Implementing SEO strategies to make it easier to identify which artists worked on specific projects.
Launching a petition to encourage streaming platforms and music execs to recognize album cover artists as contributors to a body of music on their platforms (I’ll expand on this in the conclusion)

Key Stages

Curation: Starting in 2021, Eseosa and Jessica found and uploaded 5,000 Nigerian album covers to an Airtable database. At the time, they identified 577 designers for 2,704 covers. One interesting finding was the striking ratio of designers identified to covers found. Additionally, almost 10% of the covers we scraped were produced at Ibukunola Printers — a venture that cannot be traced today. Ope writes more about these early stages in this Medium article.
Airtable Version: We chose Airtable for its versatile data storage and display capabilities. However, the Airtable design had usability challenges. The lack of guiding text or a clear user journey often left people confused.
Organising a Contest: While brainstorming ways to make the project useful to the public, Ope proposed hosting a contest for creatives to submit ideas on how to enhance it. After tweeting about it, four people (1 designer and 3 writers) responded with pitches. I paired up with Idris (the designer) to work on the website's user experience and branding. Collaborating with the writers also led to the project being featured in major publications like It's Nice That, The Guardian, and Wax Poetics.
Custom Website v1.0: Due to how the studio operated at the time, we transitioned to an open-source approach and partnered with engineers looking to expand their portfolios. I worked with Lina and Toyosi to build the website from scratch using React, SCSS, and Airtable’s API documentation. Dike joined later to assist with debugging and preparing the site for public deployment.
Current stage: The project remains open source. Ope enlisted interns at HelloWorld to further enhance the websites usability by adding new functions like a survey form for feedback, permalinks for the album covers, and an optimized filter function.

Learning and Next Steps

The next step is to build v1.2 with a well-executed SEO strategy. URLs will be readable, and artists will have profiles showcasing their body of work, which they can easily share with the world.

Regarding the petition I mentioned earlier, there’s growing recognition that album cover artists deserve more credit for their contributions. It would be powerful to bring our voices together and demand the change we want to see. Every designer and artist deserves better recognition for their work—especially now, in an age where AI can generate images for almost any purpose. Preserving the integrity and stories behind these works has never been more important.

Resource(s)

Visit Website