Hard-Fi's Stars Of CCTV sleeve was one of 2005's most iconic. But now, that difficult second album cover ... 'We looked at every way of trying to top [our first],' Hard-Fi's Richard Archer says. 'But perhaps the best way is to kill off the sleeve altogether.' They've settled on this, except the sleeve has a colour scheme, a specific choice of font and the band's name and album title. It is, in every conceivable sense, 'cover art'. Photograph: album cover
The poor man's Roger Dean, Patrick Woodroffe, who had the misfortune to be commissioned to paint sleeve art work for Welsh heavy rock band Budgie. It's modelled on Planet of the Apes, but in a shocking plot twist, the apes are replaced by budgies. Apes have opposable thumbs, incredible intelligence and the capacity to wage war Budgies have pretty feathers and like to eat seeds. It doesn't have the same level of threat, does it? Photograph: album cover
Keen to make the point that Captain Hillier-Blount would rather make love than war, the cover of his zillion-selling debut employs pastel blues, dancing animals and the strumming squaddie with his expression laboriously switched to Poetic. Look at that mute gaze, beseeching us to understand that You're Beautiful wasn't written to infuriate humanity. Makes you see the album in a whole new light, doesn't it? Photograph: album cover
There's a long and honourable tradition of indie acts using childlike cover art as an act of subversion. But the good ones are rather more subtle than Bianca Casady of CocoRosie, who - and aren't we all lucky? - chose to paint the sleeve for her group's 2005 album Noah's Ark herself. What can we deduce from her image of unicorns engaging in group sex? That she has the artistic skills of a particularly tiresome five-year-old. And nothing more. Photograph: album cover
Musicians should not paint their own album covers. Especially when the album title contains a subtle allusion to the anus. But that didn't stop Limp Bizkit's guitarist Wes Borland breaking out the oils for this monstrosity, in which goblins clutching starfish - with anuses! - sit in a pile of frankfurters. I don't know what it means and I just want it to go away. Photograph: album cover
When the Latin pop princess pictured herself as Eve on the brink of feeding forbidden fruit to a baby about to plunge to its death from a tree, many countries around the world were outraged. Strangely, it was the exposure of Shakira's truth-telling hips, not the plastic kitsch, that got them all worked up.About as erotic as Madame Tussauds' Chamber of Horrors. Photograph: album cover
Between the drugs, arrests, appearances in court, spells in rehab and yo-yo relationship with Kate Moss, Pete Doherty is clearly a very busy man. So it's lucky he found a second to scrawl on a brown paper bag for the cover of Babyshambles' debut. It warns us off the sloppy, self-satisfied rubbish within. Photograph: album cover
The Hipgnosis design team were responsible for some of history's most iconic album sleeves, The Dark Side of the Moon and Houses of the Holy among them. Recently, however, Hipgnosis's leading light, Storm Thorgerson, has produced sleeves of an unparalleled hideousness: he is the go-to guy if you want to spend a lot of money making your album look as ugly and pretentious as possible, as evidenced by Muse's Black Holes and Revelations... Photograph: album cover
Unless crafted by the likes of the eminent 30s artist John Heartfield, the collage is a cop out. This example is a variation of the genre, where the collaging of images is done in-camera. It says: ‘We've got a lot of mediocre ideas that no one can agree on, so why don't we use all of them together, thereby negating the need for a single good idea and enabling everyone to retire early to the Met bar and congratulate each other on how clever we've been.’ Photograph: album cover
The CD within has been praised to the skies, but the outside could be a particularly unappetising outtake from the Brothers Grimm. The two figures, glumly posed in hideous homemade costumes in the middle of a wintry wood, are supposed to depict the persecution of a character called Van Occupanther. That's Van in the panther head, and a tormentor in the rumpled gold jumpsuit. Ugly as sin, cheap-looking and a discredit to Midlake. Photograph: album cover
It's the type of home you imagine a second-division roadie owning - bleak, dull, nondescript, with an interior imagined during a vaguely psychotic angel-dust episode at the end-of-tour party for Nizter Ebb. Then there's the logo: it looks like the sort of thing a bored 12-year-old would carefully render on to his pencil case during double chemistry. Which may be the point. Photograph: album cover
It might be argued that a naked old man throwing up in a dustbin is the perfect visual accompaniment to such an unpleasant listen as Troublegum, but one has to call into question any artist's motive for making an album sleeve so horrid to look at. If nothing else, imagine proudly taking the gold disc round to your mum's house on a Sunday afternoon. "I think I'll just put this in the drawer, dear ..." Photograph: album cover
The cover uses a confused version of an coding system to depict a hidden message, which the album's owner can then unravel using a key located inside the sleeve. So, what brilliant, subversive polemic does it hold? It translates as X&Y, so we have the album name, twice. Or nearly. Embarrassingly, the designers got the coding wrong, so it actually translates as X96. Pseudo-intellectual guff dressed up as profound artistic statement - a bit like Coldplay themselves. Photograph: album cover
Wordless and tasteless, this is a Mystic Meg prog-rock horror. Diminutive Prince peers down at the world as though staring at a toilet he's about to be sick in. Maybe he's just realised that he has morphed from the imp of perversity into the funk Rick Wakeman.
By Betty Clarke, Michael Hann, Alexis Petridis, Peter Robinson, Caroline Sullivan and Richard Turley. Photograph: album cover
