Her covers are mostly pretty decent to good, but
Teenage Dream is quite literally iconic. It's perfect, no notes.
1. Teenage Dream
2. One of the Boys (always loved the set design and the eye catching filter)
3. 143 (no joke, I actually kind of dig this cover, but would prefer a different color scheme)
4. PRISM (it's fine, a little too unsaturated, really wish that bright light wasn't there)
5. Witness (ugly color scheme, the eyeball is stupid)
6. Smile (literally wtf is this)
Also, looking at some of the alt covers for the albums:
The 15th anniversary cover for OOTB is a further back still of the same set, we see a pool now, Katy is no longer wearing the hat. I think this one feels a little busy and prefer the original, but would still rank it high.
There's another cover of OOTB for the Korean and Japanese reissue that has an up close shot of Katy holding an eastern Asia inspired umbrella, clearly marketing towards the reissue countries lol. It would be a pretty cute cover for a single that was inspired by east Asian cultures, but for this particular album it's bizarre. It's at least aesthetically pleasing, which cannot be said for Witness and Smile.
The Teenage Dream cover with text takes away the iconicness of the original cover. Also the font design for the album title is an assault on the eyes.
The Complete Confection is an even worse assault on the eyes. It's honestly embarrassing how they went from something as amazing as the standard album cover for TD and then turned it into this atrocity for the deluxe edition. That being said, I do really like the font for the album title with the ice cream cone in the middle.
I drastically prefer the deluxe edition cover of PRISM to the standard. The darker and crisper sky color for the border (and using the sky instead of the flowers) contrasts so much better to the aesthetic and color scheme for the main image, which now has dark, cool colored butterflies to help tone down the warm and bright colors surrounding it. The only thing is I prefer the prismatic middle border and album title text on the standard to this gold thin border and basic white album title text.
I had no idea this Urban Outfitters exclusive cover of Witness existed and I'm sorry for informing you of its existence as well. I'm glad we got rid of the eyeball in the mouth, but everything else about this is a jumpscare.
These fanmade, but popular alt covers for Smile are mostly an improvement of the original, but that's not a high bar. Bottom right is actually worse. Top middle is pretty good, though. I'd rank that above PRISM tbh.
So there's a ton of variant covers for 143 coming (
see them all here). MENA Version has a cool color scheme, but I hate the photo. She almost looks like Nelly Furtado? The version that replaces the red of the original with white is an improvement, but only mildly. The black vinyl is fine, seems a bit try hard. Blue vinyl has us playing with portals now! I do like this one too, but a bit less than the original. The orange vinyl has a badass cover, truly, I just have this feeling the vibe it has (which doesn't match any other cover at all) is not going to match the album one bit. The clear vinyl is similar to the Woman's World cover. It's meh. The purple vinyl I actually really love. My only gripe is, again, that color scheme for the digital outfit they put on her. The tie-dye red, white, blue is just too 4th of July BBQ for me. If it were silver or white or marbled with one bright color and silver/white, I think this cover would be the closest she's come to capturing the perfection of standard TD.
