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This is an actual cover. Nothing's malfunctioning.
"It's like, how much more black could this be? And the answer is none. None more black."
Some people think abstraction is enough to sell.
Sometimes the best way to make something stand out... is to make it not stand out. Amongst a shelf full of angry pink balls, floating heads, scantily clad women and outright lies, some classy minimalism can work wonders.
At least one of the things below apply to such covers:
- Complete absence of everything sans the background: Self Explanatory.
- Solid color, simple gradient or just generally unsophisticated backgrounds. Alternatively, a closeup of a material used as a background.
- Single Object Focus, considering the said object exists.
- Lots of empty space for the covers that have something besides the background. Alternatively, the cover would even have an action-packed part that cover only the - say - 5% of it.
- Minimal use (or complete lack) of text.
- Any form of literarist art will do as well.
Minimalism was pretty much the art style of the aughties, that is, whenever people weren't abusing neoclassicism.
Contrast Design Student's Orgasm, which goes for the opposite strategy.
Examples:
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Music
- This trope (or at least one variant of it) would be alternatively be called The Designed Republic, after the late graphic design studio who tended to produce covers like these.
- The cover art they did for Autechre deserves mention. The one pictured comes from their Tri Repetae. And yes, that cover does look like that.
- Quaristice.Quadrange.ep.ae apparently seems like a Shout Out to Kazimir Malevich's Black Square, don't you think?
- Trent Reznor apparently loves these. Special mention goes to the Rob Sheridan-designed ones.
- The Beatles' eponymous white album.
- Metallica's eponymous black album◊.
- The Artist Formerly Known As The Love Symbol Formerly Known As Prince's Black Album.
- The cover of Benjamin Britten's recording of his War Requiem just has white text on an all-black background.
- As well as Peter Hammill's A Black Box
- Buckethead's DCK.
- Back in Black.
- The censored version of Smell The Glove is the mother of all black sleeves.
- The Songs : Ohia album Ghost Tropic has just the album title on a black background.
- Danger Mouse's The Grey Album is here to balance it out. Especially when it incidentally happens to have sampled The Beatles' White Album, mixed with the vocals of Black Album of... Jay-Z's. Whose black album was less fitting for this trope.
- Comedy duo Martin/Molloy released an album titled The Brown Album (a parody of The White Album) that had, you guessed it, a completely brown cover.
- The front cover art of most of The Young Gods releases are mostly just the band's name encraved on a diffrent background. Their Only Heaven is an even straighter example.
- Unknown Pleasures and few posthumous Joy Division compilations.
- Some New Order albums as well. The one of their Brotherhood◊ is a a photo of zinc-titanium alloy.
- Hell, Factory Records were famous for these, particularly when Peter Savile was involved. Consider The Return of The Durutti Column.
- Starflyer 59 has played with this to various degrees.
- Four of their albums had solid monochromatic covers, with no text: Silver, Gold, Americana (red cover), and I am the Portuguese Blues (metallic blue cover). The Everybody Makes Mistakes cover was yellow, with small text running along the left margin, and a large 9 as a false watermark.
- The album Dial M doesn't count, but covers of associated releases—the single "The Brightest of the Head", and the Minor Keys EP—just feature blocky white and red text on a black background.
- Alternative rap group Giant Robot released an album entitled 33 rpm Robotics. The cover? An up-close photo of cardboard.
- Few◊ of◊ Yes albums are this.
- Close to the Edge made up for its minimalist exterior by having a Roger Dean painting on the inside of the gatefold.
- Do you know Squarepusher?. The guy was incidentally signed to the record label The Designers Republic themselves were somewhat involved on, noneless.
- Cover of Justice's (the french electronica duo) debut album Cross consists solely of the glowing cross on a black background.
- Dark Side of the Moon, anyone?
- The Wall and Atom Heart Mother too.
- Aphex Twin and his 26 Mixes for Cash.
- The cover of the second print of his Come to Daddy is just the white "An image of children chasing after an ice-cream from an Orange™ TV commercial advertising Text messaging." text on an orange background. Agian, The Designers Republic did it.
- And Chosen Lords.
- Among some of Swans' stuff, there's their eponymous EP◊.
- Coldplay's X&Y, (plus every single from that album) as well as their only (so far) compilation album.
- Every LFO album has a pretty abstract cover, with Sheath being the most fitting to the trope.
- Orbital's album Middle of Nowhere has a cover consisting of a big "O" and a walking man, with a very small text accompanying some versions of it.
- One edition of Mindless Self Indulgence's If.
- The Church and their Untitled #23
- One prerequisite for this trope has been subverted with Explosions In The Sky's The earth is not a cold dead place◊ which cover consists of nothing BUT the album's name written all over and over it (with the band's name written in one place with a red outline) on a white background.
- In Rainbows does the similar "write the titles all over it" thing, with the fancy explosion in the background.
- XTC's Go 2 is another album which the front cover consists of a block of text. The text contains a humorous diatribe on album covers◊
- The Field's Yesterday and Today
- A Fire Inside's Sing The Sorrow, especially the U.S. tour edition cover.
- The Pet Shop Boys' albums Introspective◊, Very◊, and Bilingual◊.
- Talking Heads' Talking Heads: 77◊, Fear of Music◊, and Brick◊.
- Russian rock group Kino and their Black Album, released after their lead singer Viktor Tsoi passed away.
- Also, their Blood Type (for abstract art) and A Star Called The Sun (for single object focus/simple black background)
- Both of the two (so far) Hard-Fi albums. The cover for their second album◊ Once Upon a Time in the West (as well as the covers for all◊ three◊ singles◊ from the album...and the cover of the promo CD◊ for the first single) goes even so far as to hang a lampshade on itself.
- Portishead's Third.
- Funkstörung's Appendix.
- Radiohead's Amnesiac, even better if you have the limited edition, which is the red book pictured on a front cover of its standard CD release.
- The censored cover of Tool's Undertow is mainly a one big barcode.
- The cover of Pinebender's Too good to be true is mainly a blue grid paper so you can draw your own cover art on it. The album's first pressing even included a pencil into its jewel case.
- Beck's The Information does the same, except that it comes with stickers (perhaps you could always get your own pencil if that wasn't enough).
- Public Image Limited's Album. Or Cassette. Or Compact Disc, depending on the format.
- The band Flipper called PiL out when they felt the latter ripped off the former's Album - Generic Flipper. Which is ironic considering that the cover of the Flipper album is strangely reminiscent of Gang of Four's untitled EP, commonly known as Yellow EP.
- All the three Soviettes albums.
- The Chicago Transit Authority.
- Some of Low albums kinda fit.
- Slowdive's Pygmalion.
- So far, both two albums by The Field.
- Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion, although there's a little more to it because it's an optical illusion◊. When the band made a musical appearance on The Late Show, David Letterman held up their record and joked that it was available "in wallpaper stores everywhere".
- Adlib's MCD.
- No Line on the Horizon.
- Joy Electric's The White Songbook◊, Hello Mannequin◊ and The Ministry of Archers◊.
- The Modernist Editions, a series that takes covers of classic albums, like The Beatles' Abbey Road or Pink Floyd's The Wall, and distills them down to a black-and-white pictogram.
- Brakes - ''Give Blood''◊
- Shinedown's "The Sound of Madness."◊
- The Hush Sound's first album, ''So Sudden''◊
- Rush's Hold Your Fire◊. Also, their self-titled debut, 2112, and Counterparts.
- Susumu Yokotas album Grinning Cat. See it here◊
- John Zorn's I.A.O.◊
- Coil and their Time Machines◊.
- Steely Dan's Aja◊.
- Led Zeppelin's self-titled debut, with the famous image of the Hindenburg explosion. Also, Coda.
- The Police's Ghost in the Machine.
Video Games
- The Designers Republic were involved with earlier Wipeout installments. It shows especially well in case of the third game and its Updated Rerelease.
- The later The Elder Scrolls installments, starting with Morrowind.
- Just about every Quake installment sans Quake Wars. The jewel cases for the first one sometimes go as far as to feature just a game's (and id software's) logo on a gritty background, withouth any text whatsoever.
- The first Half Life (before the GOTY edition that has Gordon in it). This carried over to european releases of the expansion packs, as the US releases do feature their protagonists.
- Darker is an obscure PC game set in a planet that is pitch-black in one side. Appropriately enough, its cover art besides the title, logo and the stickers feature a black silhouette of the city with two power plants superimposed on a nearly black background.
- The front cover of US and Japan releases of the first Metal Gear Solid - aside from the company logo and the Playstation label - just feature the title in the white background.
- If you live in America, maybe. The UK covers are the game logo across a simple line illustration by the game's character artist on a white field. The illustration itself is pretty pale, with the lines filled by a light gradient, so it's easy to mistake the cover for actually being black text on white and nothing else.
- As Portal shows, Valve is apparently very fond of this kind of stuff.
- The original version of the cover for The Orange Box was going to be just that: pure orange, with a list of the games. The final version got changed.
- If it's not for the detailed background its cover happens to have, Dead Space would otherwise count, with its focus on that severed hand.
- More fitting example would be Left 4 Dead. Surprise, it's Valve.
- Limited Editions of some games may be packaged with this kind of cover, notably the 2008 Prince Of Persia one.
- Most of the front cover of Blood is a hand-shaped splatter on a black background.
- The old PC game Quarantine◊ (completely unrelated to the 2008 movie).
- Beneath A Steel Sky
- Ultima VII: The Black Gate. (Ultima VIII: Pagan and IX: Ascension were originally planned to do the same, in red and white respectively, but that didn't happen.)
- The later US releases of Pagan have the Pentagram removed from the cover for some reason, making the cover more qualifiable for this trope.
- Diablo:Hellfire expansion pack.
- 9 : The Last Resort (no connection to the certain webcomic or the 2009 CGI film) is an Adventure Game with - I kid you not - Robert De Niro involved in its production. Its cover - company logos aside - features mostly a monkey holding a card with an "9" on it.
- The European versions of the first MDK.
- The entirety of Mother series, sans the American version of the only entry in the series to be released outside Japan.
- The first six games in The Legend Of Zelda series made use of this.
- The first game had a shield with one section cut out to reveal the cartridge inside.
- The second game had just a picture of a sword on the cover.
- By A Link To The Past, the game's logo on a gold background was the only cover art these games had. This lasted until the Oracle series, which had rather crowded box art by the series' standards.
- Black And White.
- Non-GOTY editions of Return To Castle Wolfenstein.
- The Dark Spire.
- This obscure adventure advergame.
- "Vanilla" Neverwinter Nights and it's sequel. Few of their expansion packs count to some extent as well.
- Internal Selection
- The Japanese and PAL releases of Final Fantasy games from VII to X originally had a cover with the game's logo on a white background. Examples 1◊, 2◊, 3◊, 4◊. This actually makes the more complex covers of the American releases look downright odd to people used to logo and white.
- Darwinia.
Literature
- The covers of the second and third Twilight novels are black backgrounds with the title and some random object that may or may not relate to the plot. (A flower and a ribbon, respectively.)
- And given Twilight's success, every other YA fantasy novel cover these days has a similar design.
- Many, many old books are like this, with just a title printed on the side, of course some of those could be because the book jacket is missing. It always just seemed to be my impression of old books in libraries, anyway.
- it can also be because the original cover fell off and got lost and the library rebound the book in hardcover
- Faber & Faber's poetry books are often this (example◊).
- Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon and Against the Day, released in 1997 and 2006, respectively.
- The first edition of Richard Bachman's Thinner
- Not counting the mylar cover it was packaged in, Madonna's book Sex just has the title in tiny, raised letters on a blank cover.
- About a few of Cormac McCarthy's books.
- The UK/Ireland editions of the Wheel Of Time books all have plain black covers bearing the author's name, title of the book, and a line drawing of the Wheel and an ouroboros. These are considerably more popular than the horrid and nonsensical American covers.
- The English-language paperback editions of the ''Haruhi Suzumiya' novels feature a plain red cover with an understated title and a small, easily-overlooked silhouette of Haruhi. The hardcovers, however, bear the original Japanese art, probably on the grounds that anybody buying the hardcover is already a die-hard fan.
Film
- The poster◊ of the Vincenzo Natali film Nothing only feature the two protagonists on a white background. And the said protagonists don't cover much space there. Besides the title, billing block and the company logos, that's pretty much it.
- Aside from all of that text, the poster of the Children Of Men adaptation is all about the fetus.
- Some posters (and covers of few DVD versions) of the Darren Aronofsky film Pi were this.
- Some theatrical posters of the second, fourth and fifth Friday The 13th movies.
- The theatrical poster of Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of The Shining.
- The Frighteners.
- Some DVD editions of Twelve Monkeys were this.
- Oliver Stone's The Hand. Guess what the poster contains.
- There's also his World Trade Center.
- The first◊ two◊ Poltergeist movies.
Tabletop Games
- The Hero System 4th Edition cover was four-color comic book action with art done by notable comic-book artist George Perez. By fifth edition, Hero Games couldn't afford that sort of thing anymore. So fifth edition is black on black, with only the Hero Games logo on the cover.
- Now that they have all that MMO license money Hero Games could afford to do that sort of thing again, but chose instead to again go minimalist with a Yellow logo on a Blue background for the 6th Edition cover.
Comic Books
- Some collected editions of Watchmen only have the smiley face on the cover.
- Some have an extreme close up on it that shows only part of one eye.
- Variation: In some versions of Final Crisis issues, anything that isn't a text cover only a 1/3 of the front cover.
- The all-black cover of The Amazing Spider-Man #36 (#477), save for the Marvel Comics header and the logo. This issue is the 9/11 tribute issue.
- The all-white cover for Zero Hour #0 (1994), which implies that the DC Universe was already erased at that point.
- Back in 1968, this◊ Steranko Nick Fury cover was considered almost too minimalist to publish— Stan Lee couldn't fathom publishing a cover that was black and white, and so insisted that Steranko color the title and Fury.
Manga
- Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service has covers in brown and one other color, a dramatic difference from most manga covers.
New Media
- The Goons have once launched a photoshop contest on "classy" literature-influenced covers for various modern Video Games. Some of the entries kinda fit for this trope. Here's the now fourth edition of it.
- This VGBoxArt entry managed to spoof this.
Other
- The infamous Is God Dead? TIME magazine issue.
- Also, Newsweek's The Decline and Fall of Christian America issue.
- Esquire magazine's October 1966 issue cover, and the New Yorker's issue following 9/11; voted #8 and #6, respectively, in ASME's top 40 magazine covers.
- News magazine The Economist once ran an article about zero inflation. Apart from the small red-and-white logo the cover just had a big white 0% on a black background.
- Speaking of The Economist, This spoof would be possibly the best minimalistic cover ever if it were true.
- This ad.
- The flag of Libya is entirely and monochromatically green.
- The Onion made fun of this in their Our Dumb World book: "The flag of Libya represents green."
- Then there's the white flag of surrendering, the red flag of communists and socialists, and the black flag of anarchists.
- Covering the Hutton Inquiry, The Independent had a blank front page above the fold with just "WHITEWASH?" (in red) and "THE HUTTON REPORT" (in black).
- One issue of Icon magazine was this.
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