Which album and single art is your favorite?
I'm a simple man. I like the covers that have the pillows on them. Please Mr. Lostman, TYMT, and Fool on the Planet are some of my favorites. RUNNERS HIGH and Happy Bivouac are two other favorites. Both feel pretty iconic.
As for singles, Another Morning and Hybrid Rainbow are pretty great.

Least favorite:
I'm not a fan of anything that uses stock photography. Stroll and Roll is pretty bad and doesn't feel very "pillows", in my opinion. Wake Up x3 is my top least favorite. I think it's pretty frumpy looking. Tabasco Disco and Comic Sonic, for singles.

I like the covers where they went out and staged actual photoshoots for them, Happy Bivouac, the Tiny Boat single, PML, TYMT/AMAP etc. There's some funny footage on the WOTS DVD of the photo session for Tiny Boat.

We talked about this on the Discord already but I also like the artwork of Good Dreams and the Last Dinosaur single, and Mafu helpfully pointed out that they were done by this man. http://www.tomovsky.com/TOMOVSKY/disco.htm

Pied Piper has probably the worst cover they've ever done, with the possible exceptions of Stroll & Roll and Moondust.

Man... that's a tough one. I'd probably say Happy Bivouac. Yes, it's also my favorite album, but the bum on the cover is so jolly even though he's knocked over. I love it! Little Busters would probably be second. Third would be No Self Control. Something about the kid floating away is cool. Here's a reminder for everyone.

[img]https://auctions.c.yimg.jp/images.auctions.yahoo.co.jp/image/dr232/auc0302/users/7/5/6/1/kobas721-img600x450-1315900799t8zexa44200.jpg[/img]

I wish I knew more about the Happy Bivouac cover, who shot it, where at, was it an actor on the cover or just some guy, etc.

It's really hard for straight, cis-dudes to do play with cross-dressing without getting into casually (or explicitly) transphobic/trans-misogynistic territory, but I think the [url=https://i.imgur.com/LwGEgSG.jpg]AMAP cover[/url] is pretty strong.

Right off the bat, I think there's more personality to it than the Thank You My Twilight cover. Sawao is lookin' like a snack, flashing a look at Shin. Shin's clearly settled into himself - his eyes are scanning something in the distance. Manabe's expression is harder to read, but it has a familiar mild/dreamy quality. The costuming and make-up are solid. They didn't half-ass this shoot. On the TYMT cover, the guys just look tired. On AMAP, they look like characters - like there might be a story there.

As for worst arts, the OOPARTS/HORN AGAIN/MOONDUST trilogy are clearly the easiest targets. They're goddamn terrible. But Wake Up 3x was where the awfulness started in earnest. The colors, the Creepy White Folks that Sawao loves so much, the cut-out-eyes, it's just...[url=https://imgur.com/a/6Bxjl]painful to look at[/url].

[quote="Spike"]I wish I knew more about the Happy Bivouac cover, who shot it, where at, was it an actor on the cover or just some guy, etc.[/quote]
There's actually a tiny bit about the cover written on the official website. http://pillows.jp/s/disco/19991202/
It says "it's really well-made and there are rumors, but it's actually just an old man laying down. Although he looks happy, when there was no camera around, he was in a bad mood. The location is a ski-resort". The resort (as credited in the album booklet) is Nobe-yama Ski Resort.

[quote="GoldenRhino"]As for worst arts, the OOPARTS/HORN AGAIN/MOONDUST trilogy are clearly the easiest targets. They're goddamn terrible.[/quote]
[quote="Spike"]Pied Piper has probably the worst cover they've ever done, with the possible exceptions of Stroll & Roll and Moondust.[/quote]
I cannot agree with the hate for the [i]Moondust[/i] cover; I think it's great. Yes, it's stock art but I think it's a great fit with the music on that album. Something about the majestic and formidable impression of the lions coupled with the subduing, almost melancholy purple colour scheme; it essentially describes the album for me.

I do like the TYMT/AMAP covers as well. There's certainly more personality in the latter than the former as GR pointed out but I dig the composition of the TYMT photo over AMAP, and they just look damn cool on the TYMT cover (esp. Sawao in the middle with his head back).

My all time favourite is probably [i]Fool on the Planet[/i] (another composition kinda thing; also Manabe looks カッコイ af in the middle; and the colours and the city in the background, it all just comes together, ya know?), probably followed by "No Self Control" (freaking rules) and "Hybrid Rainbow". Other good ones [i]Good Dreams[/i], [i]Please Mr.Lostman[/i], "Movement" (in the way it looks, not in its half-assed photoshopped premise), "White Summer", "One Life", "Girlfriend", "Kanojo wa Kyou", and "Strange Chameleon". A lot of the DVD covers have been pretty cool too (especially [i]Nook in the World[/i] and its reversible cover).

As you can tell, I like a lot of the covers with the band members in them.

[quote="GoldenRhino"]Right off the bat, I think there's more personality to it than the Thank You My Twilight cover. Sawao is lookin' like a snack, flashing a look at Shin. Shin's clearly settled into himself - his eyes are scanning something in the distance. Manabe's expression is harder to read, but it has a familiar mild/dreamy quality. The costuming and make-up are solid. They didn't half-ass this shoot. On the TYMT cover, the guys just look tired. On AMAP, they look like characters - like there might be a story there.[/quote]

More than just the cover itself I think it's the duality with TYMT that makes it work so well, like it's the same cover in an alternate universe. "Another Pillows" like the title says, perfect for a collection of b-sides. They clearly thought about it, had an idea and went for it.

[quote="Mafu"]There's actually a tiny bit about the cover written on the official website. http://pillows.jp/s/disco/19991202/
It says "it's really well-made and there are rumors, but it's actually just an old man laying down. Although he looks happy, when there was no camera around, he was in a bad mood. The location is a ski-resort". The resort (as credited in the album booklet) is Nobe-yama Ski Resort.[/quote]

Thank you for pointing this out, I had no idea that info was there. I guess a Ski Resort makes sense considering all of the Mt. Everest imagery/themes on the rest of the artwork. I looked into it and the area seems to have some beautiful scenery.

So the guy on the cover was really just "some guy" after all, huh?

PML is my favorite; simple yet artistic and an aged quality to it that matches the album itself.

Special mention to the Sono Mirai Wa Ima and Good Dreams art, those are both awesome. It's a cool tidbit to learn that a musician did them. I do also like the TYMT/AMAP pairing a lot too; I agree that AMAP is the better of the two, but I feel like it being a companion to TYMT's is what helps make it work.

To quote Spike quoting GR quoting Sawao, Horn Again/Moondust/Stroll and Roll is peak don't give a fuck territory of stock photo + logo + impact font. For the problems people have with Wake Up x3, Pied Piper, etc, I feel at least they were vaguely trying with those.

Yeah I have to say, I honestly really like the sono and good dreams covers.
The fact that they are are actually artworks (as opposed to images etc) makes them cool in their own right.
Tomovsky did them. They are pretty awesome. Not sure if i like his music or not though.

I think that the Pied Piper cover art isn't so bad, actually. I remember when it first came out, someone (GR?) found the photo location in Seattle and took some sweet pictures.
Wake up x3 was probably the first time that I flipped through a pillows booklet and felt disappointed. The entire booklet is full of the corny photoshop art.

By the way, you can also check out some of Maya Maxx's art [url=https://www.facebook.com/mayamaxxsoul/]here[/url]. (Instant Music, RUNNERS HIGH)
You can see more art by Shikachan [url=http://shikachan.chips.jp/illustration/]here[/url]. (Penalty Life, Terminal Heaven's Rock, Delicious Bump Tour in USA, Go go Jupiter)
Here's [url=http://shikachan.chips.jp/sugerbain/]another picture[/url] that he made when Sawao produced a song for Takeshi Tsuruno. Not crazy about his style, though.

I think Pied Piper is just awful. The terrible uninspired grunge font, overexposed city backdrop with a tiny cutout of the band on a manhole cover, it's just awful. It's worse than awful, it's [i]generic.[/i] It looks like a cover made by a computer algorithm. Almost every other cover has that slightly-offbeat pillows aesthetic, sure Wake Up is lame, but I can look at that and say "this is lame in a weird way." Pied Piper looks like something from a different band.

The only cover that gets worse marks from me is Stroll & Roll, which is literally a royalty-free stock photo with impact font on it.

On Stroll and Roll, the cloud on the lower right corner is edited into Busterkun, so... at least there's that.
All the pictures I find online don't have the Busterkun cloud edit for some reason, so I [url=https://imgur.com/a/gV2FW]scanned my own[/url].

Also, the original image doesn't appear to be royalty-free.
https://amanaimages.com/info/infoRM.asp ... 1493000087
You can even see the [url=https://amanaimages.com/info/UsageHistory.aspx?SearchKey=01493000087&GroupCD=0]usage history[/url].

Well it's nice to see them following my guide.

[img]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/zzxidpivxe2f4wk/pillowsalbum.png?dl=0[/img]

the fact that spike's fake cover example looks like it could pass without question as an actual pillows album/single cover really shows the true extent of how disappointing some of their artwork has been.

but i still like the moondust cover a lot considering buying the B2 poster of it from yahoo auctions