Alex Steinweiss

Alex Steinweiss was born on 24 March 1917 in Brooklyn, New York, the son of a women’s shoe designer who had emigrated from Warsaw and a seamstress from Riga. He showed drawing ability early and came under the influence of Leon Friend at Abraham Lincoln High School — a teacher who introduced him to European avant-garde typography and poster art. That exposure would shape everything that came after.

He won a scholarship to Parsons School of Design and graduated in 1937, then spent two years at the Advertising Agency of Joseph Platt before joining Columbia Records in late 1939 as its first art director. He was twenty-two years old. The job had no precedent because the role had never previously existed: Columbia, like every other record label, sold its product in plain brown paper wrappers.

Steinweiss changed that in 1940. He proposed illustrated covers to Columbia’s management, designed the first one — a night-time photograph of a Broadway theatre marquee for Smash Song Hits by Rodgers & Hart — and watched the label’s sales respond immediately. A redesigned Beethoven Eroica cover increased that album’s sales ninefold. Columbia gave him free rein.

He served in the US Navy between 1943 and 1945, then returned to freelance work across Decca, London Records, Everest Records, and Remington, while continuing to produce covers for Columbia. In 1953 he developed the standard paperboard sleeve for the new 33⅓ rpm LP format, extending his original innovation into the format that would define the music industry for the next four decades.

By the early 1970s he had designed approximately 2,500 album covers. He retired to Sarasota, Florida at around age fifty-five and turned to ceramics and painting. A new generation of music collectors and design historians found his work again in the years before his death. He died on 17 July 2011, aged ninety-four.

Steinweiss described his approach as building covers in the tradition of the French and German poster designers of the 1930s: flat colours, isolated symbolic forms, and a metaphorical rather than literal relationship between image and content. He did not photograph performers. He interpreted the music.

For a Brahms symphony he might use abstract instrumental fragments. For a Gershwin recording he placed a piano on a dark blue field under a stylised streetlamp. For Boogie Woogie he drew giant hands striking keys — an image that carried a deliberate point about racial integration in a segregated industry. Each cover was a small poster.

His own lettering — the Steinweiss Scrawl — became the typographic signature of the era. Drawn by hand out of necessity when commercial typesetting was unavailable at his Bridgeport studio, the curly, looping script appeared on hundreds of Columbia covers through the 1940s and was later adopted by Photo-Lettering Inc. as a commercial font. It is now digitally available and widely cited as one of the earliest instances of a designer’s handwriting becoming a brand asset — before the concept had a name for it.

“I love music so much and I had such ambition that I was willing to go way beyond what the hell they paid me for. I wanted people to look at the artwork and hear the music.” — Alex Steinweiss