True Blue (Madonna Album) - Packaging

Packaging

The album cover, shot by photographer Herb Ritts, is one of Madonna's most recognizable pictures. It features a picture of Madonna from the neck up. The main colors in the picture are gray, white and various shades of blue to reinforce the album's title. Madonna positioned herself in an elegant pose while wearing pale make up with red lips, tilting back her neck in a swan like pose. Jeri Heiden, who was working at Warner Bros. art department, was given the task of editing the photos and making them compatible for appearance in an album cover. She had to work with a total of 60 rolls of photos, each of size 35 mm. Heiden ordered about 30 to 40 test prints from Ritts' studio and made recommendations based on it. Several images from the photo shoot were considered for the album cover, some of which later became the single covers for "Papa Don't Preach", "True Blue" and "Open Your Heart". The final photo was selected by Madonna, Heiden and Jeff Ayeroff, creative director of Warner Bros. at that time. After the final photo was selected, Heiden commissioned two different versions of the album cover. The original image was taken in black-and-white, and Heiden experimented with a variety of treatments of the photo, to go along with the album's title, and finally arrived at the blue toned, hand tinted version of the image. The LP and CD album cover is a cropped image of a longer picture including torso, more of which is seen in the cover of the cassette tape edition, and was also included as a fold-out poster in the initial pressings of the LP. A poster of Madonna, mirroring the cover art, was included within the vinyl versions of the album. In the US and Canada, the cover did not have any logo, but in the European nations, they were sold with Madonna's name and album title on the cover. Heiden explained in an interview with Aperture magazine that they thought it would be "cool" to use a shrink wrap on the US covers, so that when one took it off, there would only be the photo of Madonna. For the European nations, Warner felt that the name was needed on the cover, as they did not want to take chance with Madonna's popularity there. The back sleeve and the booklet inside featured the song titles in Heiden's own handwriting. About cropping the image for the cassette and the vinyl versions, Heiden said: "I think the image became more interesting cropped into a square—and at that time we always started with the album cover configuration. It was like she was floating—her clothing was not visible. She took on the appearance of a marble statue—Goddess like. In the vertical cropping you see her leather jacket and the wall, and it becomes more typical, editorial, earthly."

According to Lucy O'Brien, author of Madonna: Like an Icon, the album artwork was on-par with Andy Warhol's concept of pop art. She felt that the image was a mixture of innocence, idealism, while incorporating 50s-style Technicolor and hand tinted color, characteristic of Warhol's silkscreen printed design, prevalent in the 60s. Jeri Heiden, the album's cover designer commented, "She was already highly aware of the value of her image and was in control of it. After I took the photo, it appeared as if she was floating—her clothing was not visible. She took on the appearance of a marble statue, goddess-like." O'Brien felt that the artwork heralded the arrival of a new Madonna, while drawing on the enduring appeal of her celluloid icon Marilyn Monroe. "With this picture, Madonna made explicit the connection between Warhol and herself, the vivid nexus between pop art and commerce. The late 1980s marked a new era of the pop artist as a brand, and Madonna became the first one to exploit this." Erica Wexler from Spin described Madonna on the cover as "like a cobra basking in the hot sun, Madonna on the cover of her new album stretches her profile lasciviously." Author J. Randy Taraborrelli commented in Madonna: An Intimate Biography, that the album cover indicated how True Blue was a vehicle of growth for Madonna. He felt that the washed out color photograph of her with head tossed back and eyes closed was understated, especially when compared to the sexier poses with which she had been associated in the past. The album's inner sleeve did not feature any photographs, instead was dedicated to album credits and the song lyrics. This was due to the fact that Madonna wanted to be best represented by her work on True Blue, not her image.