“Image is nothing.”

The soda company’s ad flashes across the TV screen, encouraging viewers to buy Sprite for its quality and to look past the company’s celebrity spokespeople and fancy commercials.

“Image is nothing, thirst is everything,” the commercial redundantly declares.

Ask Limp Bizkit’s frontman Fred Durst about his image, and he’ll tell you otherwise. Durst’s red Yankee’s cap worn with Dickies pants and a black T-shirt has become the calling card for the entire band, as well as the outfit of choice for thousands of Bizkit fans across the United States and around the world.

Durst’s wardrobe has become such a big part of his band’s image that Bizkit’s most recent release, “Significant Other,” managed to capitalize on his look. Featured on the cover of the album is a graffiti artist’s rendition of Durst sporting a microphone, a red cap and the same oversized down coat that was seen in the “Nookie” video.

What is the function of an album cover? Is it merely a playground for graphic artists or an advertisement selling the band as a product to consumers?

Does the artwork of an album lend clues to the musical style of the band? Or its personality?

Ann Ballen-Ladenson, vice president of graphic services at Disc Makers, will tell you it’s all a matter of circumstance.

“I feel very strongly that an album cover is an artistic statement,” Ballen-Ladenson says. “I think that the packaging is a critical part of music. When you look at the trends now of digital downloading of music, a lot of people are wondering ‘OK, does this mean that nobody is going to need to buy prepackaged music?’ I disagree completely.

“I think absolutely that people are going to want to have the packaging as well as the music. You have pictures of the artist, you have the lyrics, and you have a whole vibe that goes along with the music.”

Ballen-Ladenson thinks artwork is a creative opportunity for bands as well as a way for them to communicate with their target audience. The sensibility of the artwork often will reflect a band’s personality, however, she says you can’t judge an album by its cover.

“I am a sucker for packaging,” Ballen-Ladenson says. “I’ve been fooled many times by seeing an album cover that I thought looked awesome, bought the CD and then been really disappointed in the music. You can’t judge a book by its cover, because there’s both great packaging with bad music and bad packaging with great music.”

Disc Makers is an independent production company, located in Pennsauken, New Jersey, which specializes in helping unsigned, self-funded bands design and mass-produce their independent projects. One of Disc Makers’ major strengths is its art department, which is known for creating designs that compete with the designs of major label records.

Bands are given several options when creating the artwork for their album. Many times bands will send in several photos and text and leave the rest up to the Disc Makers art team. Other times, the band will create the entire layout for the album themselves, fitted to the templates provided by the company.

Ballen-Ladenson’s job is to oversee the creative aspects of the designing process as well as the production for all of the audio CD and CD-ROM’s produced by Disk Makers.

“At Disc Makers, it’s a little bit different than it is at some places,” Ballen-Ladenson says. “At a major label, a band might work very closely with an art director about communicating what the message of this particular album is. Here, our clients are all over the country, and we don’t get to meet with them as personally.

“For us, it’s much more about bands communicating to us what they’re going for, other than us hanging out with the band and listening to the music and observing. It’s much more difficult the way we have to do it.”

Disc Makers actually have a remarkably good track record, Ballen-Ladenson says.

“A lot of people just really trust our judgment,” she adds. “Sometimes, people are really into their music but have no ideas about their packaging. A lot of times, people will call us and say ‘I know my music; I don’t know packaging; I don’t know design; I’m just gonna tell Disc Makers what I’m looking for.'”

For the creative team at Disc Makers, the changing format size over the years has proven to be a major influence on the process of creating an album’s artwork. The trend dates all the way back to when vinyl dominated the market. The standard jacket was 12 3/4 inches, leaving much more room for creativity than today’s 4 1/2 inch CD cover.

The small space forced graphic designers to focus on having more of a concentrated image. Images also got smaller and as technology increased, more complex.

Inserts made up for the loss of space on the cover, with many CDs containing six- or eight-page foldouts. The disc sleeves allowed for bands to include lyrics as well as images with their CDs, while giving graphic designers a new playground.

Focusing on the present, trends in CD artwork are obvious. From No Limit Records’ glitter and gold-cluttered covers to the explosion of cardboard digipacks in place of the standard plastic casing, CD artwork is always on top of the current trend.

The design teams and artists who create these album covers have proven to be just as in touch with the design world as the fashion world is in touch with Fred Durst’s baseball cap.

“In terms of general trends on what people are doing, I’ve noticed lately an enormous backlash against the computer-looking designs,” Ballen-Ladenson says. “The exception is techno and computer-related music, which seems to call for computer-related designs. Those designs tend to match up really well with those bands.

“Everybody is trying really hard to make their designs look as organic and as natural as possible. We all use the tool of the computer, but to make something look like it wasn’t created on the computer even though it was is a trend that seems to be going on right now.”

An example of that trend is Ames’ own ska outfit Bolsa de Papas. The band’s debut CD, “Priorities,” is scheduled to be released Nov. 14. The group worked closely with Disc Makers in the post-production and mass-production of the album, while creating all of the artwork for the project themselves.

The album’s design was created by Bolsa’s lead guitarist Ben Bradley, a senior in graphic design. Contained inside the CD is a full-color, three-page foldout insert, featuring a collage of pictures as well as the album’s lyrics.

“One thing that I had to think about from the beginning was thinking about the CD design as an overall package,” Bradley says. “One thing that I tried to do was have visual elements that kind of carry through the whole design that kind of unify it. Another thing I wanted to do is make sure that the design had sort of a timeless aspect to it.”

The album is accented by retro stripes, cutting back and forth from cover to cover. To offset the stripes and bring a bit of timelessness to the album is an elaborate and visually stimulating picture collage.

“The collage has a lot of texture and a lot of images coming in and out,” Bradley says. “It’s so complex that I think it will be visually appealing for a long time because you’ll always be able to find new things in there. I wanted there to be a contrast between simple and complex.”

Due to the tremendous cost of multiple pages within a CD, the band decided to go with a three-page insert. The smallness of the insert proved to be limiting to the band’s artistic goals for the album, which included photos, thank yous and lyrics.

“For us, the important thing was not necessarily to look cool or to get our music or our name out, but it was kind of the message behind our band,” Bradley says. “So there were some considerations I had to make. We had to decide what was important enough to get included in the design as far as thank yous and stuff like that.”

He says the album’s artwork captures what he feels CD artwork should capture. Expressing visually a band’s musical style as well as the personality of its members is a task often taken for granted.

“I think that a lot of times different visual styles are easily related with musical styles,” Bradley says. “Like when you look at a heavy metal album, you can tell most of the time by the cover what style of music it is, even by things like the font choice or how the band’s title is written out.

“I think that a lot of times, the style of the artwork on the CD goes hand in hand with the style of music, especially if you think of ’80s metal and things like that. There was a lot of generic stuff that came out, but it was real obvious what the music was gonna be like just from the design of the album.”

From ’80s metal to Limp Bizkit, CD artwork will probably continue to define the musical styles of everything from entire genres of music to individual bands.

As music progresses and technology continues to improve, the artwork defining today’s bands most likely will continue to progress.

Ballen-Ladenson says the whole concept of CD artwork needs to be put in perspective, however.

“Obviously, the music contained on a disc is more important than the packaging of the CD,” she says. “You wouldn’t have packaging without a CD. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not important in providing an important function in helping to sell that CD and to actually enhance the listening experience.”