album art as room art

When I was a young and foolish Sophomore in college, I took color copies of all my CD jackets and wallpapered the inside of my dorm room door with them (my whole collection at the time fit on the door - times have changed). Relatively unsophisticated as interior design strategies go, and not the technique most likely to get me onto HGTV, but I was still pleased with the effect, and I got a lot of positive comments on it during the year.

Now that I'm setting up an honest-to-gosh listening room, I'd like to find some means of decorating classily with album art. I've had the idea of digitizing all my album art (or, more likely, scamming available lo-rez images online) and attempting to create a photomosaic - possibly of the Chagall Paris Opera ceiling. I don't know how much success I could expect in such an attempt; probably I could improve my chances by picking a black&white image and making all the component images grayscale (though I don't have a favorite b&w image in mind).

I know we're not necessarily designers here, and some of us like me are relatively decorationally challenged, but does anyone have or know of great examples of album covers integrated into room decor?

sakhavi said:

I know we're not necessarily designers here, and some of us like me are relatively decorationally challenged, but does anyone have or know of great examples of album covers integrated into room decor?

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Photoshop will allow you to experiment in many ways such as, Blurring, adding motion, adjusting opacity, changing them into an Andy Warhol effect, Crayon effects, stained glass, or solarize, etc, etc.

Even for me, and all the other designers I work with, we have to play around with the image until it feels right. This can take a long time, and sometimes not, we never know. Perhaps, you can try changing them to grayscale and then slightly blurring them. Or reduce 50% in scan and place them in a frame with a large matting.

Experiment, and always keep it simple.

I'm going to give away my Dream Room design, use it if you want. My concept is similar to what you might find in a high-end bookstore magazine rack. The image below is not that, but should give you an idea one way or the other.

The design would/will be 2"x2" hardwood (or built up to be approx 3"x3") at 16" to 18" center to center forming a grid - or squares.

To keep the LP's from falling off the wall/out of the grid, a 1/4" x 1-1/2" stip of clear plexiglas about 1/3 of the way up from the bottom is secured to the wood grid (horizontal - side to side). Simply slip the LP in from the top slot and you have display and storage all in one - similar to a magazine display rack.

Keep the LP's rotating and out of the sun - build as full wall to wall, floor to ceiling (good for room acoustics too).

sounds cool, kach22i; I'd had vaguely similar thoughts (though my collection's entirely CD) but I was wondering whether it would be acoustically wise to introduce a broad reflective surface like that into the room. Though if it's broken up into a grid by 2x2s, I imagine it would be ok. For CD's, though, that'd be a lot of lumber ={)>

Yea, a smaller 9"x9" grid for CD's would be a lot of lumber - plus the typical plastic case would be reflective. Could you fit them into something similar as to what's pictured below?

My original the LP concept display system raises some interesting prospects. Such as the backer wall. Is it several layers of drywall? Brick? Perhaps a regular wall; furred-out with wood or metal strips, covered with a final layer of drywall. This would act an acoustic damping spring.

Add to this the slight tilting angle of the LP, the cardboard jacket, and the small triangular airspace left behind the LP which may trap certain wave-lenghts (sound tuning) - so many posiblities.

There is another concept you may want to explore. this concept is based of the sound diffusion panels you may of seen for sale. Some are wood blocks of different heights glued together, others are dense paintable foam (based on some kind of math formula).

In my version - I've picked up metal printing press plates glued to different thickness of wood. I plan to mount these on plywood to create my own random non-scientfic sound diffuser/art panel (plates are old building pictures for a local news paper of long ago).

In your version, you might have your color photocopies dry-mounted on to dense sign/letter foam. The foam blocks would be hot-wire cut to the size you want (same size as CD or larger or smaller to match printout). As in the other diffusion examples the blocks may be of different thickness, perhaps the return sides are colored, perhaps you use pre-colored foam.

One other way, perhaps even simpler is to have your flat-sheet paper artwork transfered onto fabric. This fabric can then cover a sound panel or be stretched into an old (really cool) wooden picture frame.

The only reason I am going on about incorporating the artwork into a sound panel of some type is the reason you stated. You just might be creating a reflective non-acousticly pleasing piece of wall art. You would be missing an opportunity to improve your rooms sound - and you could be kicked of this forum for such an activity.

Click on the Skyline LP diffuser PDF in this page link (different than the picture below): http://www.rpginc.com/proaudio/index.htm

sakhavi said:

Now that I'm setting up an honest-to-gosh listening room, I'd like to find some means of decorating classily with album art.

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ebay is a wealth of album art. if you like "classic" 80s there is a seller "postersultan" who sells a lot of 12" promo covers that were distro'd to record stores. very frameable.

i was looking for a poster of Thomas Dolby's "Golden age of wireless" album to go with my Eico tube gear, but never got around to buying one even though many poster sized ones come available.

the one that really gets me going is the 5' tall promo poster of Joe Jackson's "Body and Soul" - incredible capture of the jazz samba era. but when i contacted the seller, she said that she couldn't find it. grrr.

album art is great.