Iconography
One of the ways in which Luaka Bop has established the identity of their unclassifiable pop is through the design of album covers. Working with renowned designers such as Tibor Kalman, Stefan Sagmeister, Scott Stowell and Stephen Doyle, the projects are based in a visual language familiar and exciting to the contemporary eye, instead of settling on staid ideas of the non-American music released. David Byrne comments, "We don’t do covers that look like folkloric records or like academic records of obscure material of interest only to musicologists and a few weird fringe types... we work with the designers to come up with a graphic statement that says "this music is relevant to your life." Tibor Kalman's M&Co. was the first to begin this execution; he designed the Brazil Classics 1 & 2, To Scratch That Itch and also began the tradition of the mutable split-colored spine, which would be altered with every change in distribution. During the Warner Brothers era, Stefan Sagmeister designed the first Luaka Bop poster of a pearl floating in space, inscribed with "The World Is Our Oyster" and also designed Adventures in Afropea 3: Telling Stories To The Sea, using the drill to mark promo CDs as the basis for the insert, with every page's separate image revolving around the small hole in the middle. Most recently, cartoonist Paul Hornschmeier illustrated Luaka Bop's history for the 20th anniversary release, along with Yonlu's A Society In Which No Tear Is Shed Is Inconceivably Mediocre. When faced with the problem of photographing Kings Go Forth, an 11-piece group, KGF's Andy Noble suggested outsider artist Mingering Mike. After spending a lifetime creating faux-album covers, he finally agreed to lend his hand to an actual release, 2010's The Outsiders Are Back. Mike's original drawing included 5 band members and was reworked to include 11 with the aid of designer and artist Paul Diddy.
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