Sound Colour Vibration (Music | Art | Film | Technology | Science | Culture)

Color in Motion Volume 212

Hipgnosis (Storm Thorgerson, Aubrey Powell, and Peter Christopherson)
1968-1982

One of the greatest album art teams ever and a constant source of inspiration to everyone here at Sound Colour Vibration. Doesn’t get better.

From Wikipedia:

In 1968, Thorgerson and Powell were approached by their friends in Pink Floyd to design the cover for the group’s second album, A Saucerful of Secrets. This led to additional work for EMI, including photos and album covers for The Pretty Things, Free, Toe Fat and The Gods. Being film and art school students, they were able to use the darkroom at the Royal College of Art, but when they completed school, they had to set up their own facilities. They built a small darkroom in Powell’s bathroom, but shortly thereafter, in early 1970, rented space and built a studio.

When first starting out, Powell and Thorgerson adopted their name from graffiti they found on the door to their apartment. horgerson said they liked the word, not only for sounding like “hypnosis,” but for possessing “a nice sense of contradiction, of an impossible co-existence, from Hip = new, cool, and groovy, and Gnostic, relating to ancient learning.”

Hipgnosis gained major international prominence in 1973 with their famed cover design for Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. The final design was one of a several versions prepared for the band to choose from, but according to drummer Nick Mason, the ‘prism/pyramid’ design was the immediate and unanimous choice. The record itself was wildly successful—it became one of the biggest-selling and longest-charting albums of all time, putting it in the hands of millions of fans, and it has since been hailed as one of the best album covers of all time (VH1 rated the cover as #4, in 2003). After that, the firm became in-demand, and did many covers for high-profile bands and artists such as Led Zeppelin, Genesis, UFO, Black Sabbath, Peter Gabriel, The Alan Parsons Project, and Yes. They also designed the cover for the original UK paperback edition of Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Peter Christopherson joined Hipgnosis as an assistant in 1974, and later became a full partner. The firm employed many assistants and other staff members over the years. Of particular note were freelance artists George Hardie, Colin Elgie, Richard Evans and Richard Manning.

One notable fact was that Hipgnosis did not have a set fee for designing an album cover but instead asked the artists to “pay what they thought it was worth”, a policy that only occasionally backfired according to Thorgerson in his book on album cover design.