Bill McMullen's 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.

California raised designer and illustrator Bill McMullen, but when he came to New York, he joined Cey Adams and Steve Carr, co-founders at Def Jam’s The Drawing Board. McMullen designed the album packaging for Foxy Brown’s Chyna Doll, DMX's It’s Dark and Hell is Hot, plus the Beastie Boys' Hello Nasty. In 2006, McMullen paid tribute to New York's five boroughs by designing a series of sneakers for the Adidas adi-color project. Like many designers, McMullen has also tapped his design talents to create vinyl toys, working with Kidrobot to form the collectibles. This year, McMullen will be a part of Toronto's "This Is Not A Toy" show, unveiling a major Star Wars-inspired project. For this list, the prolific designer looked back a few decades to share the tales behind some of the most important album art from the 1990s. Here are Bill McMullen's 10 Favorite Rap Album Covers of the '90s.

RELATED: Cey Adams' 10 Favorite Rap Album Covers of the '90s
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Year: 1993
Art direction: Jean Kelly for ZombaArt
Photography: Terrance A Reese a.k.a. TAR (heads) / Carol Weinberg (woman on back cover)

"I just liked all the photos of the artists. I think I could name about 75 percent of the people on there, maybe 70 percent. There are some friends of the family type of people on there.

On the back, cover it continues. I think I've seen a poster that has everyone represented. This is an interesting one. The different formats: cassette had more people on the front than the album did. The format changed the image depending on which format you bought. It's just a great concept. You would have to reformat your cover to fit on a cassette, even though a CD wasn't perfectly square. It's a little bit wider than it is long. You'd have to keep the files kind of liquid so you can change it a little bit. It was kind of fun."

Year: 1995
Art direction: Cyril Gittens
Photography: Mark Humphrey
Illustration: Denys Cowan

"You're trying to figure out who they're trying to represent—kind of the same thing as A Tribe Called Quest. Who's who? That's Vanilla Ice! It was kind of weird trying to speculate what [the cover] meant.

It's cool that you are limiting this to the '90s because it was an interesting time when hip-hop was maturing musically and also visually. Finally a lot of hip-hop artists were exploring an area that hip-hop artists don't always get to explore, kind of like a fantasy element of things. It's not just photos of King Tee walking up the block with a shotgun, it's not just N.W.A standing in front of a camera."

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

"Public Enemy goes from [being pictured in] a parking lot to a fantastical painting of a planet moving in front of the Earth [in Fear of a Black Planet]. It's like the concepts are opening up dramatically, creating sort of their own Sgt. Pepper's of thematic concepts. It's not just a collection of singles or songs. It's a concept that might have actually dictated what was on the album.

Graphically it has a planet moving in front of it, but really what it's saying, of course, it's, 'Black people are moving into your neighborhood; black people are moving into your television commercials; black are people moving into acceptance.' That might be something that could cause some fear. Conceptually it's like this crazy nightmare of the KKK. This awesome concept just beautifully executed into artwork."

Year: 1996
Art direction: Brian "B+" Cross
Photography: Barney Bankhead

"First of all, Mo' Wax put out some of the best covers ever. The visual experience, the representation of what you're getting. It was one of those top concepts that explains Shadow's world of intense record digging, a favorite record store, hundreds of records. All of it signals what went into making the record itself. It's awesome. I love that cover.

With Endtroducing....., it is a very intimate photo. They're not posing, but it encapsulates everything. The artwork was so epic to myself, as someone who was a DJ and a graphic designer. It's not really my favorite DJ Shadow album. I always prefer the EPs that came out before it. "

Year: 1991
Art direction: Amy V. Fine
Photography: Peter Bodtke

"Breaking Atoms is another one of those fantastical elements. These guys are sitting around forming the galaxy. Just imagine Sir Scratch, K-Cut, and Large Professor are sitting there with the light glowing on them. They airbrushed it to look like the cosmos or the galaxy. They have that glow on them and pretend that they're looking at something. I just love that fantasy element again. "

Year: 1992
Art direction: Eric Haze
Photography: Glen E. Friedman

"Check Your Head is like a teardown of all the storytelling and fantastical elements that were a part of Licensed to Ill and Paul's Boutique. Visually it represents so much of back to basics: 'Here's where we're at. We're the Beastie Boys and this is a Glen E. Friedman photograph.' It's very stripped down.

There was a lot going on with them. I think where they were faced with the reality of, 'Oh that album [Paul's Boutique] really didn't do that well.' I even I read interviews where they didn't even rhyme anymore on that album—it was just music. "

Year: 1992
Art direction: Marc Cozza
Photography: Matt Gunther

"Daily Operation means so much to me. It represents exactly the life of Premier and Guru. Premier is in the background with some records, and Guru is right there. It's like hip-hop was maturing a little bit so that more of the artists could adopt a weirdness that primarily had been reserved for artists in other genres. It almost looks like this weird Renaissance painting. Visually to me it's like the Godfather taking the DJ on his daughter's wedding day. "

Year: 1990
Art direction: The Drawing Board
Illustration: Bill Sienkiewicz

"Conceptually it's pretty daring for EPMD, but it's not weird like Outkast because you have Andre 3000, who is a bugout anyway. To go in on a concept like that is cool, I like that type of thing. Plus it has "Rap Is Outta Control," which is one of my favorite hip-hop songs. "

Year: 1991

"The Geto Boys' album cover just rocked everyone. An entire generation, culturally, was like for a week, 'This guy's fucking eye is poked out. What the hell is this?! I can't believe this!' This was so important that year. It meant so much that they just put a photo of themselves in the hospital. A friend of mine loves that album cover. It's not really controversial. It's just one of those weird things. It's like someone putting a photo of themselves at the dentist on Instagram. It's a very personal, real moment. It's not them with cars in a parking lot. It was a weird experience at the hospital. And then this happened... so it would still land today. "

Year: 1999
Art direction: Brent Rollins
Photography: Brian "B+" Cross

"I love this packaging. It's a great album too. It was one of the earlier things I've seen Brent [Rollins] do. On the interior it has a gatefold and photos of children surrounded by a collage of speakers and music equipment. I haven't looked at it in a long time. It's not like one of the best albums of the '90s. It's just one of those visual albums."