Asher did not have a favorable reaction to the title. He remembered that Brian showed him "some proofs of the pictures they'd done at the zoo, and he told me they were thinking of calling the album "Pet Sounds". I thought it was a goofy name for an album – I thought it trivialized what we had accomplished." Jardine expressed disappointment with the cover and said he had "wanted a more sensitive and enlightening cover." Author Peter Doggett writes that the design was at odds with the increasingly sophisticated cover portraits used on releases by artists such as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan over 1965–67. He highlights it as "a warning of what could happen when music and image parted company: songs of high romanticism, an album cover of stark banality."