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The year’s best cover art — from albums that actually didn’t suck.

All too often we see killer album artwork, only to find it covering a total musical let-down — perhaps banking on the trite notion that people will indeed judge a book, or in this case an album, by its cover.

So we sifted through a sea of mediocrity and sheer hideousness, both graphic and musical, to bring you the most innovative album covers of 2008 — from albums that were actually good. Really, really good.

THE ODD COUPLE

Just like movie sequels, second albums are usually more of a disappoint than an upgrade. Always the non-conformists, electro-pop-hop duo Gnarls Barkley does nothing of the sort. Their second album, The Odd Couple, oozes cinematic beats, powerful vocals and compelling lyrics.

The cover art belies the album’s unique urban sensibility bent through a prism of crisp electronica and vibrant Brit-pop-like undercurrents and an urban sensibility.

Best track: Going On.

19

From the UK’s smoky underground bar scene straight to the soundtrack of just about every American primetime drama, British sensation Adele is just that: a sensation. Amy Winehouse without the substance-induced self-destruction, her powerful raspy voice and infectious melodies stick to your soul like a housefly on melted licorice.

And there’s something to be said for using pure portrait photography in cover art — perhaps because it’s so incredibly difficult to do tastefully, it’s a rarity these days. The few contemporary artists who do it mostly go for an overly Photoshoppy textured and filtered photo, or simply bail with an abstract illustration.

19, however, is supreme in its clean, bold simplicity. The rich negative space and minimalist color scheme yield to the meticulous lighting and the natural curves, building a powerful sense of mystery and allure — a perfect visual metaphor for the music within.

Best track: Right As Rain.

MADE OF BRICKS

Another breath-of-fresh-air British import, Kate Nash burst onto the global scene this year. Made of Bricks vibrates with her perky beats and angst-driven yet profound lyrics, it’s like The Clash was reincarnated in the body of a 23-year-old girl.

The album art captures the Tim Burtonesque magic of Nash’s music — poppy, almost child-like beats and vocals that turn chilling and heavy in a split second under the burden of an adult mind.

Best track: Pumpkin Soup.

SANTOGOLD

The artist who took SXSW by storm and invaded the hipster scene faster than a new American Apparel V-neck did so in good right. Her eponymous debut album is nothing short of brilliant, with a sound so utterly unique that it may just be the stuff of tomorrow’s music history books.

The album artwork, much like the music inside, is a bold manifestation of minimalism with a punch, from the quiet, grainy black-and-white photograph blasted with an unexpected burst of gold, to the provocative layout and muted yet unusual typography.

Best track: Lights Out.

DAVID BYRNE & BRIAN ENO

Yep, we were all over David Byrne and Brian Eno’s latest album, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today — a more-than-worthy compensation for the pair’s 27-year-long absence from the music frontlines.

The cover design itself is both refreshing and nostalgic in that eerie retro-futurism kind of way, complete with slightly-off 3D imagery and an oddly metallic color scheme.

Our favorite track, Strange Overtones, also happens to be a free download on Amazon, so go grab a copy and be your own judge. Yep, it comes with the artwork.

IN RAINBOWS

There was buildup. There was anticipation. There was hype. Which means Radiohead’s In Rainbows had a lot to live up to and could easily disappoint. Except it didn’t.

The artwork itself captures the crisp, high-energy and indulgently vibrant sound of the album in all its organized chaos. Not to mention it inspired arguably even more awesome fan covers and a ton of utterly brilliant motion graphics.

The cover art even inspired an iGoogle spin-off — three artist themes designed by the band and an amazing motion graphics gadget for the House of Cards video.

THE SLIP

Speaking of buildup, no one comes anywhere near Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails in that department — we’re talking elaborate secret immersive games, iPhone apps, user-generated music videos, and a very clear message to major labels instructing them to perform anatomically impossible acts.

Their latest “surprise” album, The Slip, was released label-free and without any promotion under a Creative Commons license and despite (or, Trent Reznor may argue, because of) intentionally releasing the album to bit torrents first, it generated tremendous response with over 1.6 million downloads from the official website alone, on top of torrent downloads and CD sales.

And as far as the album artwork goes, the cover image — creepy-cool as it may be — isn’t really the album’s greatest feat. Each song on it actually comes with its own artwork, some alluding to older albums and clearly part of a bigger message for fans to decode.

We have to give it to NIN for extreme originality and innovation across pretty much every facet of the music industry and every fan touch point.

Best track: Discipline.

Rice from Shakespeare, how to help cure cancer, 60 million ways spam helps literature, a first-person snooper, and solid proof you may be the wrong gender.

In their quest for a share of our increasingly strained attention capacity, many charities and nonprofits have resorted to some rather atypical methods. Including online games, which let people contribute to a good cause simply by playing. Here’s our pick of the 5 coolest, smartest and funnest charity-benefiting games.

FREE RICE

You may recall this project from a while back. You may even have a slight FreeRice problem — the thing is positively addictive.

“The thing” being a neat little web game that tests your knowledge of various “advanced vocabulary” words SAT-style and donates 20 grains of rice to third-world countries for every right answer you get. Just yesterday, 72,724,400 grains were donated thanks to vocab junkies like ourselves, with over 50 million grains donated since the game’s inception a little over a year ago.

And the “game” is no joke either. Composed by professional lexicographers, it ensures maximum benefits for your vocabulary and aims to benefit people in the developed world as well by helping us sound smarter, formulate ideas better, make greater impact with our speech, score better on tests, and give better job interviews. The game even remembers your vocab level as you play, so it automatically adjusts the difficulty level to ensure you’re making tangible progress. There are 50 levels total, but getting above 48 is Shakespearean.

FreeRice is a sister site to Poverty.com and donations go through the UN World Food Program. And while 20 grains of rice may not seem like much, there are millions of people playing. Together, it’s a chip at the world’s enormous hunger problem that causes 25,000 deaths per day, most of them children.

The idea, needless to say, is pure genius. Talk about symbiotic benefit. Not to mention it’s certainly a better (as in funner and gooder) timesuck than watching random people’s cats fall into toilets on YouTube.

Go, be all smart and humanitarian. And check out FreeRice’s extended web presence on Facebook, MySpace and Think MTV.

Word up.

FOLD.IT

Hooked on House, Scrubs or Grey’s Anatomy? Here’s your chance to make your contribution to medicine without the drama.

fold.It is a brilliant game that lets your inner puzzle geek help advance key scientific research. How? You’re given a cool 3D model (which happens to be an actual protein structure) and you have to figure out the most compact way to fold it, competing against other players. That 3D model is actually scientists’ best guess as to how that protein may be shaped. Because proteins naturally take the most compact shape possible, finding an even more compact way to fold one completely changes any previous understanding of that protein.

Why is this important? A protein’s shape determines its function. So by helping discover the shape, you’re essentially helping scientist understand how a protein works, which enables them to target it with drugs.

Plus, it sure beats poring over grandma’s Manhattan skyline puzzle.

>>> via GOOD

RECAPTCHA

Okay, so this one isn’t really a game. CAPTCHA, the ubiquitous anti-spam human filter, is more of an annoyance, really — spammers get annoyed that they can’t get their bots past it, and non-spammers get annoyed because, well, we’re not spammers and we have to waste time on it.

That’s exactly what inspired the guys at Carnegie Mellon University and the Internet Archive to put that colossal waste of humanity’s time — 150,000 hours of work each day, to be exact — to use. reCAPTCHA was born, a project that capitalizes on this human effort by helping digitize books written in the pre-computer (yikes!) age.

Here’s the tricky part about digitizing books the usual way — they’re first scanned, which turns each page into an image, and computer software attempts to turn the shapes of the letters into actual digital text. That’s called “Optical Character Recognition.” Which is cool, but it’s incredibly inaccurate.

That’s where reCAPTCHA comes in. It takes words that can’t be read by a computer and places them in those annoying little spam puzzles, so that actual humans help decode the text. It’s called human computation, and it’s absolutely awesome.

Like any large-scale wisdom-of-the-crowds approach, the average of millions of people’s guesses amounts to a virtually error-free result. (There are, after all, 60 million CAPTCHAs solved by humans around the world every day, just in the normal course of web-dwelling.)

The project is currently helping digitize books from the Internet Archive and old editions of the New York Times.

So if you run a website, especially a blog, grab reCAPTCHA for your site. And check out this interview with reCAPTCHA founder Luis von Ahn on Wired.

HOMELAND GITMO

When Boubacar Bah, a Guinean tailor detained for overstaying his visa, died in a New Jersey jail last year, human rights organization Break Through jumped on it with a rather unusual effort to raise awareness about the inhumane conditions of immigrant detention in the U.S. (We’re talking pregnant women being forced to give birth in shackles and HIV-positive patients being denied medication.)

Homeland Gitmo, a web-based video game, casts the player as a reporter seeking clues in the death of Mr. Bah.

It may sound hum-drum, but the investigation, the plot and the interface actually make for a pretty thrilling game. The reporter takes an undercover job as a detention guard and discovers things backed by links to real newspaper articles, court documents and other factual material.

This kind of first-person appeal brilliantly taps basic psychological principles for impact much greater than a mere article about the incident could have. To take it a step further, the site offers multiple ways to take action — finding your local Gitmo, speaking up online, and donating.

>>> via The New York Times

GWAP

The web has its fair share of funny-sounding names (Squidoo and Google, we’re looking at you), but GWAP actually stands for something, literally: Games With A Purpose.

The outfit, out of Carnegie Mellon University, designs games for humans that help make computers a little more intelligent. It’s like that “human computation” thing we mentioned about reCAPTCHA, which is no surprise since reCAPTCHA mastermind Louis von Ahn is actually one of GWAP’s founders.

Currently, they offer 5 different games, all based on a pairing principle that randomly matches players up and gives each partner various tasks. Check them out:

• The ESP Game, which shows both partners the same image and asks each to guess what words the other is using to describe the image. Players win points for correct guesses. It’s essentially an image tagging effort, designed to make image search richer and more efficient.
• Tag a Tune, which is similar to ESP in structure, but obviously uses tunes instead of images and asks players to decide whether their partner is listening to the same tune based on words he or she is using to describe it.
• Verbosity, a Taboo-style game in which one partner, the Describer, has to describe a word giving clues to its meaning and the other, the Guesser, has to — duh — guess it. The game, surprisingly fun and addictive, aims to collect common-sense facts about words, stuff that’s strongly associated with a certain concept but wouldn’t be found in the word’s dictionary definition.



• Squigl, another image-based initiative, in which players are shown the same image and each holds down the mouse to trace an object their partner is describing. They get points if their traces match. It’s a genius concept that aims to help computers recognize objects more easily by their shape.
• Matchin, which simply shows players two images and asks them which one they like better. This one was the foundation of GWAP’s Gender Test, which promises to correctly guess your gender based on images you pick out of image pairs. (We regret to say it failed miserably on us, telling us with 70% certainty that we were the other gender.)

Tag a Tune is probably our favorite, party because we consider ourselves rather the musicologist types, and partly because music search is the least developed of the tag-based search genres and needs the most grassroots help.

So start playing nice and pick up a new favorite timesuck that scores you some karma points to offset the should-be-working guilt.

Private confessions, citizen voyeurism, a shot at redemption, why it pays to have famous friends, and how graphic design changed politics forever.

In the year of the YouTube election, innovation in political communication spanned virtually every medium. As the big day is upon is, we look back on an incredibly tumultuous political season with our selection of the smartest, most revolutionary election-related ideas.

THE SAYHEAR PROJECT

In a political climate where the “get out and vote” message seems to be spewing out of everywhere (and rightfully so), it’s worth taking a step back and asking ourselves the simple question: Why are we voting today?

That’s exactly what design studio Gershoni did with their experimental sayHear project, which assigns a toll-free number to each of the 4 voting options – Obama, McCain, 3rd party, and non-voter – and invites people to call with the reason for their choice, then displays the results in a neatly designed interface.

You can hear all the confessionals on the project website, ranging from the fully serious to the giggles-in-the-background prank calls. Listen to one particularly funny one here.

>>> via BoingBoing

NYT’S POLLING PLACE PHOTO PROJECT

The best documentaries record monumental events that change the course of history. That’s exactly what The New York Times is out to do with their Polling Place Photo Project, the first-ever nationwide experiment in citizen journalism.

The project aims to create the largest photographic archive of the actual battleground of every presidential election — hum-drum polling places — capturing the richness and complexity of voting, a visual record of human behavior in that final stretch of choosing our political destiny.

You can already browse photos from this year’s primaries and caucuses, or upload your own. So don’t forget your camera today.

MICHAEL MOORE’S SLACKER UPRISING

Notorious filmmaker and whistle-blower Michael Moore made movie distribution history this year with his latest political documentary, Slacker Uprising, which became the world’s first feature-length film to launch as a legal free release.

The film, covering the filmmaker’s failed attempt to save the Democrats from themselves in the 2004 election by rallying people to vote with a grassroots tour of 60 cities in the battleground states, is above all a call to action in hope for redemption this time around.

(We covered it in detail here.)

WILL.I.AM’S YES WE CAN SONG

After Barack Obama’s New Hampshire primary speech in January, artist will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas got overwhelmed with the desire to prevent the “unfair, backwards, upside down, unbalanced, untruthful, corrupt” process of the last election. So he called up a massive lineup of celebrities to produce a revolutionary music video based on Obama’s speech. (We first covered it here.)

The video became the most-watched election-related video on YouTube, with over 30 million views across its various uploads, and set off an avalanche of buzz across the social web. It inspired an equally moving spinoff, the HOPE.ACT.CHANGE. project, which invites Obama supporters to upload images of themselves and rebuilds the video into a gloriously designed multimedia mosaic of them.

SHEPARD FAIREY’S OBAMA POSTERS

In January 2008, artist Shepard Fairey did what he does best to show his support for Barack Obama – he designed a poster.

Little did he know the 350 limited-edition PROGRESS screenprints would sell out in minutes, the HOPE print would go on to become part of the Obama camp’s awareness campaign, and the posters would become the most iconic images associated with this presidential campaign.

Here’s to the power of supreme graphic design and art direction.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

There were, of course, a ton of other tremendously innovative efforts. A few more of our favorites included the Obama social network; the efforts to give voice to those who are impacted by the American election but can’t vote, like the nation’s 29.1 million home-owning, tax-paying legal aliens or, you know, the world; the clever and tremendously amusing Things Younger Than McCain site-turned-book (which is funnier if you skip back through the archives); and the Field of Hope crop circle in Pennsylvania.

But what we really hope is that all this innovation is indicative of a greater cultural hunger for change. And as the 11th hour of this grand race is upon us, we can almost taste it.

So get out and vote today — and enjoy it. Your children will read about it in the history books.