Alex Steinweiss | Album-cover designer, 94

Alex Steinweiss, 94, an art director and graphic designer who brought custom artwork to album covers and invented the first packaging for long-playing records, died Sunday in Sarasota, Fla.

The record cover was a blank slate in 1939 when Mr. Steinweiss was hired to design advertisements for Columbia Records. Most albums were unadorned, and on the occasions when art was used, it was not original.

"The way records were sold was ridiculous," Mr. Steinweiss said in 1990. "The covers were brown, tan, or green paper. They were not attractive, and lacked sales appeal."

His first cover, for a collection of Rodgers and Hart songs performed by an orchestra, showed a high-contrast photo of a theater marquee with the title in lights. The new concept was a success: Newsweek reported that sales of Bruno Walter's recording of Beethoven's Eroica symphony increased ninefold when the album cover was illustrated.

"It was such a simple idea, really, that an image would become attached to a piece of music," said Paula Scher, who designed record covers for Columbia and is now a partner in the design company Pentagram. "When you look at your music collection today on your iPod, you are looking at Alex Steinweiss' big idea." - N.Y. Times News Service