Cey Adams' 10 Favorite Rap Album Covers of the '90s

This is part of a daily, week-long feature series where we asked legendary designers about their favorite rap album covers from the '90s. Read the full interview with Cey Adams here.

The album cover is supposed to appeal to your most important senses: sight and touch. What your ears eventually hear after breaking the seal on the CD, cassette, or vinyl comes later. Art directors work with a crew of designers, illustrators, and photographers to create an image that accompanies a record—one that will be hopefully hailed as a classic. This was the 1990s as we knew it. What made the releases from the ‘90s so golden was largely the artwork that made the albums as memorable as the musical styles the rappers ushered in.

And while 2013 was a banner year for music, some of the greatest albums from the '90s celebrated 20th anniversaries such as A Tribe Called Quest's Midnight Marauders, Snoop Dogg'sDoggystyle, and Wu-Tang Clan's debut album. We approached the visual artists behind some classic material to get their take on what made them so special. In this week-long exploration into the rap archives, we interviewed Cey Adams (co-head of Def Jam’s Drawing Board), Kenny Gravilles (former art director at MCA Records), Greg Burke (art director for Warner Bros./Atlantic Records), Bill McMullen (designer and former member of The Drawing Board), and Brent Rollins (Art Director for Complex).

For our first in a series of interviews, we spoke to Cey Adams, one of the most respected names in design for about 30 years. He went from writing graffiti on the streets of NY, to the board room as the creative director of Def Jam from day one in 1984. If you looked at one of the illest album covers or logos from Def Jam or Bad Boy Records during the ‘90s, or logos for Hot 97 and Chappelle’s Show it was probably created by Cey Adams through his design firm, The Drawing Board. Adams designed the book Def Jam Recordings: The First 25 Years of the Last Great Record Label, the decisive history on the legendary label, the Tommy Boy 30th Anniversary poster, and the Sean Jean logo. He also worked on the cover for one of the most beloved albums of all time, The Notorious B.I.G.'s Ready to Die. Here are Cey Adams' 10 Favorite Rap Album Covers of the '90s.

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Year: 1998
Art direction: David Calderley and RZA
Photography: Michael Lavine
Illustration: Bill Sienkiewicz

"The illustration is my favorite thing about Bobby Digital. It was a hard thing to get past the powers that be back in the day. Everything was photo-driven.

We were actually the first ones to use Bill Sienkiewicz, an amazing illustrator, who did all the Batman covers, and he ended up doing the Bobby Digital cover. In hip-hop, that wasn't really happening so much. It was very difficult back then, because they just didn't understand how you could sell records without their image being on the cover. We were always interested in using best-in-class artists when we did our work. Whether it was a photographer, an illustrator, or a painter, it was always about using people who were really talented and making a mark in their particular field."

Year: 1999
Art direction: Kenny Gravillis
Photography: Corbis

"Trying to get multiple covers was virtually impossible in hip-hop because of budget restraints. Kenny Gravillis, who used to work for us at The Drawing Board, had moved out to L.A. and started working for MCA on the West Coast. He ended up convincing the guys that if they just went with black and white, it would lower the cost. So in theory, it wouldn’t be any more money than it would be to run a color cover. I think he got the printer to do a gang run, and they made it cheap enough to be able to do five covers.

He basically came up with a concept and solved a problem when they started to debate about why this was too expensive. The cool thing about the guys in The Roots is that they were always interested in pushing the envelope and doing something interesting every single time they released a record. It was to Kenny’s credit that he was working with a band like that, because not everybody cares about that, and they’re not always willing to fight for it. In addition, having those iconic images on the cover—I mean some of them were pretty painful to look at—was still an interesting turning point in the culture, because it showed that we can do things that are conceptual, just like the rock and roll boys, and people do care, and they will pick up the record. And that was to my knowledge the only record The Roots had a hit on."

Year: 1998
Art direction: Cey Adams, and designer Bill McMullen
Photography: Michael Lavine

"It was a real collaboration between me and the Beastie Boys. It was always interesting working with them, because they just had a different way of thinking. The other great thing about working with them was that you never had to worry about the record company or management getting in the way.

They were so smart at thinking outside the box. When we did that cover, as far as the sardine can, it seemed really absurd, but we found a way between Bill [McMullen] and myself to make it work. We spared no expense. It was during the early days of computer design; now you can do that stuff in Photoshop in no time. Back then we had to make a real live sardine can. We photographed them inside that, and then we superimposed the outside out and put the real can on there. So in the photo, they really are squeezed together in a can. I still have the contact sheets!

Originally when we were doing it, it was going to be calledAnother Dimension, and that was the working title up to print. At the last minute they said it wasHello Nasty."

Year: 1997
Art direction: Darryl Zudek for The Drawing Board

"We did end up doing an oil portrait with Warren G for Look Over Your Shoulder. That was by Darryl Zudek. He was an art student, who went to school with my buddy Steve Carr, my partner at The Drawing Board. He thought it would be really interesting to do an oil painting. Again it was something we had to convince everybody at Def Jam and Warren G to do, because nobody had done that before. 'Why do you want to do an oil painting? We can just take a picture.' And we thought, 'We're artists.' Our goal was always to figure out a way to elevate the art and do something interesting to stay engaged, because we did tons and tons of covers."

Year: 1994
Art direction: The Drawing Board
Photography: Butch Bel Air

"This was an opportunity to be reconnected with Mr. Combs. He led the way on this one through the whole thing. He decided that it was gonna be a baby on the front cover. He didn’t know that we were gonna make the type really small. The idea is that we wanted it to be delicate, because there was a baby as the subject. The title was so absurd that we didn’t have to hit you with these giant block letters. We thought we’d do something really delicate.

On the single covers we ended up going really large with the type. It was the exact opposite of what we did on the front cover. If you ever look at any of the singles on that album, they were all the same typeface. They were a lot larger to emphasize the power of the music and the image of a big guy."

Year: 1990
Art direction: The Drawing Board
Illustration: Chuck D and Pete Johnson

"Chuck sketched out the concept on a napkin. He had just gotten in from a flight, and he just said, 'This is the cover.' That's traditionally how he would work. He would come in to the art department and sit down with us to just brainstorm for a little bit. We had to find Pete Johnson, an illustrator who worked with NASA. Our idea was to find somebody who did illustrations for NASA, because they understand how space illustrations should be done—like how all the stars and planets work—to make sure that the shadows are done properly."

Year: 1996
Art direction: The Drawing Board
Photography: Cey Adams

"It was a huge honor to work with the Geto Boys on their reunion project. I was really excited about that, because I always loved the Geto Boys' 'My Mind’s Playing Tricks On Me' and all that, but I never had any relationship with any of the artists from the Dirty South. I went to Houston, and we discussed it and photographed it. Them being in the coffins and all of that was really creepy stuff, to be honest with you, but I didn’t have to get in the coffin. It was amazing to see the lengths these artists would go to express their creativity. It’s fun when you have artists who have the freedom to do exactly what they want to do. They were another one of those acts where nobody told them that they couldn't do this or that.

They really loved the way this church looked. The other thing is a shack of this old house. They really enjoyed that, as well. I was trying to figure out a way to incorporate all of those things. So at first it was gonna be just the coffins, and then I thought, that’s not gonna be strong enough, and it’s gonna be a little bit scary, but then the church didn’t really convey the message that they wanted to convey either, so we ended up combining all three of them. They agreed that was the best."

Year: 1993
Art direction: The Drawing Board
Photography: Danny Clinch

"This is gonna sound funny. At the time, I was working with Bad Boy a lot. Heavy D was a huge star when Mary J. Blige’s What’s the 411? record came out. So I worked on the Mary J. Blige record, and I kid you not when I tell you that I tried to get through it as fast as I could, because I was so excited at the possibility of working with Heavy D. In retrospect, that record ended up not being anywhere near as important as the Mary J. Blige record.

We went with a pretty traditional photograph that Danny Clinch took of him.Heavy has a logo, and so what I did was a variation on his logo. I always wanted to do something that would let people who were following what I do know that I had a hand in it. I would do it as often as I could, but I would mix it up so that it wasn’t always one record after another. I made sure that the type was on an angle; it was a little bit thinner, and I used a different pen. You can look closely and see similarities in the hand-styles."

Year: 1998
Art direction: Brad Digital for The Drawing Board

"That was another turning point, because we made the character look like Super Mario—a video game. Nobody had done that before. This was at a time when computer technology wasn’t nearly as advanced as it is now.

We hired this guy named Brad Digital, who was basically a video game geek. He came in to the office and brought this special PC in. He rendered that stuff in like a month and a half. He was one of those guys who, if you let him leave the office, he wouldn't ever come back. This was the beginning of the vinyl toy boom, and he was doing all these other things.

It’s a really beautiful piece of artwork in and of itself. Every angle on that thing was done so well. It looks really beautiful. The colors are so nice and rich. If I’m [not] wrong, it was one of the first times a hip-hop artist created a three-dimensional character that they ended up really identifying with and sticking with like a mascot, to a certain degree."

Year: 1992
Art direction: The Drawing Board

"Puff basically created everything that you are looking at. For lack of a better of term, he practically art directed the record as far as the visuals go. The record is really beautiful in how it’s a simple image with a smoky hook to it. Her hat is pulled down so much that you can’t see her face. When I think about it, it’s really, really in line with some of the early, sort of 'gangster' images rappers had.

To this day, she has consistently used my logo over and over again, which is one of the things I enjoy about working with somebody like her. People think that’s her signature. I just looked at Anita Baker and all those traditional R&B records, and I thought, I’m gonna learn how to do hand-lettering that looks like that.

For me, if there was an opportunity to reconnect with my graffiti roots and work with hand-lettering, I'd take it. I had to make sure that my hand skills were still up to par, because once I started doing design on the computer, everything was just type-driven. When I did that logo for example, I did no less than 30 versions of it. Then I would cut and paste them together to look like one complete signature. Years later, when Puff did Sean John, he was like, 'Yo, I want a logo similar to that Mary thing you did.' So I had to create the Sean John logo to mirror that. That’s where it comes from."