Lady Gaga released her Born This Way album cover last night at midnight CST and the reaction has been exactly what you think it would be:

If you’re not a designer or an artist, you’ll probably either love it or hate it within 3 seconds of seeing it. If you have a designer’s instinct, you’ll hate it. If you have a designer’s perspective, you’ll love it. And I’ll tell you why:

First of all, you have to count this as a complete success. Why? Because she got what she wanted from the designer. She’s incredibly proud of this cover and she loves it. As far as designer/client relationships go, the client walked away from this project happy and fulfilled. Great, so where does that leave you? Hating what she wanted? Don’t be so quick to knock it off your radar, you have to think like an artist to get there:

There are two major design-level themes going on here: Less-Is-More and Retro-Grade-Amnesia.

Less-Is-More: Well, it’s a minimalist cover so the name speaks for itself, but think along the lines of “Less Complicated is More Involved.” If you move aside the aesthetics (which we cover in theme #2) and look at the content of the art, you have a half-motorcycle, half-girl. The genius of this image is that with such a simple idea she has tapped into numerous themes and references. First, we have the mythology. She’s the modern day Hell’s Angels Americana Minotaur that existed 20 years ago. Untouchable, mythical, magical, and ever-elusive. Then notice the more subtle suggestions that run the gamut from literal to abstract: She wants you to ride her. She’s on the road to becoming who she was born to be. She’s a machine. She’s complete nonsense. She’s completely serious. She’s simple. She’s complicated. The list goes on and on. If you truly look at the content and think about all the different meanings that you can see in it, you have a piece of art doing exactly what art is best at doing.

Retro-Grade-Amnesia: My god, she and her designer have completely forgotten that MS Paint already happened. This composition has designers from coast to coast scratching their heads and wondering, “What happened to the aesthetic she was building?” They’re wondering that because while Gaga and her team have been through many phases and representations, most recently becoming increasingly 1984 West Coast darlings, they have done so in an outwardly “forward-thinking” way. It’s been in a way that flirts with retro-80′s while making use of contemporary design aesthetics and standards. In this cover, they are fully committing to the past. Gaga and her team haven’t forgotten that MS Paint already happened, they’re going back and completely exploring the possibilities of it. Her music and her fashion have been an aggregation of pop culture, and now her designers are getting on the bandwagon. Don’t expect everything she puts out from now on to look like this; this is simply her designers jumping on board and committing 100% to the retro-style she’s setting up for them. And it has many really interesting effects on modern-day consumers. People are ‘underwhelmed’, ‘disappointed’, ‘confused’, and so on (and of course her Little Monsters think it’s ‘brilliant’, ‘gorgeous’, and ‘sick’). Well, here’s the genius of it: In 2 weeks, it will be completely accepted. She can say ‘Fuck you’ to the evolution of aesthetic computer graphic design and she knows that in the end everyone will accept the cover, maybe even end up loving it, and fulfill our destinies of attention deficit disorder virtuosos. In any case, there’s nothing else like this out there in the industry today. Her and her designers may have retro-grade amnesia, but they’ve put out something that is 100% unique and distinct (by today’s standards), and 100% representative of where she is at creatively right now. I think people get turned off because it’s not 100% representative of where THEY are at creatively right now, which is usually the case but rarely seen in this day and age. I don’t know the last time I’ve seen such strong reactions to an album cover – As a designer and an artist, I find the precision with which she keeps every last person completely surprised by everything… well, nothing less than art itself.