Gang of Four - Mall (1991)

This album cover would already be pretty lousy if it had come from some rinky-dink pop-punk band or similar, which is what the album cover reminds me of. It's absolutely depressing when it comes from a band like Gang of Four that really should've known better. But then, I think the 90s made everybody kind of stupid when it came to album cover design.

Frank Black and the Catholics - Frank Black and the Catholics (1998)

Boy there's nothing like having a color palette on your album that makes its title hard to see. It's even better when said color palette consists of brown, yellow, gold, and more brown.

Chumbawamba - Tubthumper (1997)

I've talked before about 90s album cover design and its failings. Here, we see it in action. Any ape with a new copy of Photoshop could've made this fucker in about 30 seconds. Take a photo of a baby, throw a pukey pink color filter on it, paste on a big mouth, put it on a color-fill background, and there you go, instant shitty album cover.

With this cover, we also see that babies must be a recurring motif for Chumbawamba.

Ted Nugent - Craveman (2002)

This album cover was brought to you by five minutes with Photoshop's bevel tool.

Big Moe - City of Syrup (2000)

Up until now, I never realized that purple drank looked like a really lousy photoshop filter effect. Thankfully, Big Moe saw fit to demonstrate this for me while he was destroying Tokyo. Thanks Big Moe!

The New Cars - It's Alive! (2006)

More like "It took 5 minutes to make in Adobe Illustrator!"

Frank Black - The Cult of Ray (1996)

The only thing better than just one poorly-drawn face is the same poorly drawn face copied and pasted multiple times over what looks like one of those pre-made Powerpoint backgrounds.

Creed - Weathered (2001)

Despite the fact that the color scheme is horribly dreary and oppressive, despite the fact that the superimposed faces of the band members look horribly out of place and ugly, despite the fact that the sun looks like it's about to turn into a red giant and destroy us all, there is one thing about this album cover that brings a huge smile to my face; the fact that it looks like a guy is about to drive a chisel through Scott Stapp's skull.

Iron Maiden - Dance of Death (2003)

It's the attack of the Poser models! Fear their plasticine skin and ridiculous masks!

Believe it or not, I can't actually blame the graphics designer responsible for this mess. Apparently, this was only meant to be a mockup render, but Iron Maiden loved the mockup so much that they insisted that it be used as the final product. The poor graphics designer agreed to this only if his name could be taken out of the liner notes. Thus, the graphics designer got to keep his diginity and Iron Maiden lost a whole lot of theirs. Not that heavy metal has much dignity to begin with.

Devo - Total Devo (1988)

At a first glance, the cover is already pretty cheesy. Devo had started giving in to that impulse somewhere around Oh No, It's Devo!, so that was probably to be expected. Then you look at David Kendrick's chin (second from the left) and you realize that it's very obviously glued on. Crookedly. Apparently, his chin ended up getting out of the shot accidentally and they decided to fix it in a really half-assed way. That's OK, though, since I don't think anybody in Devo really cared at this point. De-evolution indeed.

Caramel - Caramel (1998)

There's always an urge among graphic design amateurs to not only use the newest, shiniest technology possible (especially anything at all to do with Photoshop), but to make damned sure that everyone knows you're using it. At best, this often results in cheesy designs that'll look bad in a few years. At worst, you end up with shit like this. Yet, somehow, Caramel add insult to injury with the man-cactus that seems like it came fully sprung out of my worst nightmares.