Clockwise from top left: Synchro System by King Sunny Adé and his African Beats; 999 by Olamide; What Happens in Lagos by Ajebutter22; Beasts of No National by Fela Kuti; Roots by the Cavemen; Rockstar Parole by Lady Donli.
By Alice Fisher
Opemipo Aikomo is a self-taught digital designer based in Lagos, Nigeria. He started out making posters at university and it was an early attempt to create a magazine that sparked his interest in Nigerian albums. “I struggled to piece together a story about the history of Afrobeats, but in the process I got interested in the designers creating cover art for what is now a big cultural export,” he says. Working with the makers’ collective Wuruwuru, Aikomo created Album Cover Bank, a digital archive of album artwork reaching back to the 1950s. Aikomo personally loves the recent output – such as artist Funto Coker’s design for Roots – but Cover Bank is about much more than art, he says. “Every album cover is a story, and this is an archive of thousands of stories waiting to be told.”
Read the original article on The Guardian.