Remember a few days ago when I was writing about that plan gray “you’ve got no artwork for this music” thing? How seeing it pop up when you’re flipping through albums on your iPhone using Cover Flow can be really irksome? Well, one thing you can do to try to remedy this is to scan the original artwork into your computer. But, if you don’t have a scanner (‘cause everyone has digital cameras, right?) or you’ve lost your disc booklets (who knew that one day it’d be good for something other than lyrics!?!), you still have another option. Open iTunes then Right-Click or Control-Click the track you want artwork for and choose Get Album Artwork. In many cases, you’ll get the right artwork. In a few cases, you’ll get the wrong artwork (if you do, just Get Info (Command-I) the track, click on the Artwork tab, click on the artwork, then click Delete). In a whole heckuva lot of cases, you’re going to get — Artwork for Artist - Album could not be found. Admittedly, some of this will be due to bad ID data. Fixing those will sometimes bring down the artwork. Many others will be due to the fact that there IS no artwork... at least not on iTunes.

So where can you find artwork if it’s not on iTunes? Pretty much anywhere on the web, really. You can go to Amazon.com and search for the album then copy the artwork from there into iTunes. You can also type the name of the album into Google’s image search which may yield good results from other music vendors or even some fansites.

Now, if your artwork isn’t in one of those places, then there may have never been any artwork associated with it in the first place. I know I’ve got a few music tracks that I just downloaded as .mp3’s from various websites (mashups and other fine listening). Even in the days of the artwork-enabled iPod, missing art for those tracks didn’t raise an eyebrow. Now, even if it’s not the right artwork, there just should be something other than the plain grey note.... right?

With that in mind, I carefully crafted that default note for your use. When you download the Keynote file, you’ll find a representation that looks similar to that dreaded default one. The idea is to give it your own colors so that, even when you don’t have artwork for something, your “default” will be your choice! Say you’ve got an

affection for a certain Northeastern baseball team known for their crimson hosiery? A few quick trips to the color picker and every song that doesn’t currently have artwork can be adorned with this lovely number! Changing up a little bit, what if you have a series of songs that would be classified as World Music, but artwise

look drab grey just like all the other unknown songs? Zip over to Google, do an image search for “world” and find one you like. Make the background black and the note white, and there you have yet another nice quick piece of artwork that’s still default looking BUT quite personal indeed. Wait, what’s that? You say you left your heart in North Dakota

(haven’t we all?) and what you want more than anything else is to incorporate a county map of said state into some default music artwork? Not only will I do that for you, I’ll also throw in some nice gradients for free!

You see, the variations are truly limitless. For example, I created the fanciful “MASH UP” album art above using only Keynote and the noartwork.key file. Adding Comic Life into the mix with Keynote (both are already on your computer if you bought recently), you

can go WAAY “out-there”. Bring in images, style your text, change the size and color of the note and voila! That’s even one more reason why you may never want to go artless again!

Don’t forget, while playing music when the iPhone’s screen asleep, pressing the home button to wake it up shows the name of the current song and the artwork for that song. If there’s no artwork, you get your wallpaper. See? That extra little bit of fun is just fun on top of fun on a fun bun with fun fries on the side with a fun shake and a fun toy surprise!