To be fair, “Photoshop Is Not Your Friend” could pretty much have been the title of this whole series, based on many of the examples we’ve had so far.  But trolling thorugh this week’s batch of new releases, I came upon a number of particularly egregious offenders that I just had to highlight.

The program Photoshop is an incredibly useful tool that has forever changed the way designers work – from professionals at the highest level to whoever Christian Scott paid in 40s.  The endless options it gives you, and the ease with which it allows you to manipulate images, play with text, fonts, formatting – every element of the design process – would probably have given Saul Bass a heart attack.  But with great computing power comes great responsibility – that is, the responsibility to exercise a modicum of restraint and not let the computer do the designing for you.  But as of yet Adobe has not instituted any kind of prerequisites for purchasers of this software, so anyone that can scrape together a couple hundred bucks can have this power at their disposal.  Many of them, I’m sure, start with the best of intentions, but the road to hell, as we all know, is paved with good intentions and Photoshop filters.

As with so many albums I come across, this one seems like it perfectly communicates what kind of music is contained within, but probably not in the way the band intended.  From the band name to the album title to the swooshy time-lapse lights (Is it just me, or was that the album art thing of 2009?  Did people just figure out how to do that or something?), to the mussed-just-so hair, to the cool sans-serif fonts, to the blown-out graphics, this record screams “bland rock that desperately wishes it were interesting.”

I can hear the interview now: “So, where did you guys get your band name?”  “Well, we had a practice space over on Tenth Avenue North, and we thought . . . that sounds cool!”  (To be fair, yes, I had a band once that was named after the house we practiced in.  It was a better name, though, I promise.)  “And the album title?”  “Well, a lot of our lyrics deal with light and dark, you know?  Like, love and pain, and good and bad, that sorta thing.  So I wanted the title to talk about that place where the light and dark come together.”

You know, there’s nothing wrong with going out to the park and taking a photo of your band standing around looking at the camera (ooh, but that other guy is looking to the right!).  No one’s going to look at your album cover and think “wow, they must not have Photoshop; what a boring cover.” This seems to be a case where if the designer had stopped just a few mouse clicks back, it might have been acceptable – or at least not physically painful to look at for more than a few seconds.   But no, they just had to go run that last filter to tie everything together.

Jennifer Knapp’s Letting Go is, compared to Tenth Avenue North’s album cover, positively restrained.  It’s just a picture of flailing girl and a few words.  And yet, does the desaturation/color replacement here really achieve anything?  Is there any reason this couldn’t just be a tastefully color-balanced – or even fully black and white – photo of Ms. Knapp on a white background?  Instead of seeing a pleasant-looking woman in a state of (I assume) rock-induced bliss, we see the hand of the Photoshopper, thinking “hey, wouldn’t it be cool if she was black and white, but her jeans were bright blue and her shirt was sort of pee-yellow?”  No, sir, it would not.  Undo.

When the cover of Blake Lewis’s Audio Day Dream was made public, pretty much everyone on the planet thought “Jesus Christ, what the hell were they smoking?”  Kaskade’s design team, however, apparently took it as some kind of challenge: who can design the goofiest, most ludicrous album art, and convince the artist in question that it is totally badass?  Well, this round goes to whoever put together this monstrosity.

Say what you will about Cocorosie (and there’s plenty I could say), at least they’re in on the gag.  Poor Blake and Kaskade are just pawns (sober, serious-eyed pawns) in an evil game between ingeniously terrible designers.  Only a genius could have come up with this insanely garish hodge-podge, managing to nod to the awfulness that is Audio Day Dream (crazy colors! serious dude! space!!!) while making it look like The White Album in comparison.

The designers of this particular abomination have absolutely earned the Evil Design Genius of the Day award.  As The Devil Makes Three (via Sean Jones) say, “If you’re gonna do wrong, buddy, do wrong right.”  I look forward to seeing how Lewis’s team responds.