![]() ![]() As with so much of Dean’s great art, the result was incongruous but powerful.ĭean also supplied the original Virgin Records logo in 1973 and based his cover of Steve Howe’s first solo album ( Beginnings, 1975) on the landscape seating he designed for Ronnie Scott’s jazz club. ![]() His cover for Tales From Topographic Oceans (1973) was a landscape painting based on English coasts taken from Dominy Hamilton’s postcard collection, mixed with representations of the Mayan temple at Chichen and the plains of Nazca. Dean also designed the classic Yes “bubble” logo, which first appeared on the album Close To The Edge. Roger Dean, the celebrated artist, designer, architect, and publisher, created some of the most famous prog rock covers of the 70s, especially for the band Yes, starting with the album Fragile. His creativity was not halted by the arrival of the CD, and his design for Pulse, the Pink Floyd live CD, featured a flashing light on its spine. Thorgerson insisted on doing almost all his photographic shoots on older equipment, largely ignoring the advent of digital technology.Īmong his later triumphs were album covers for Catherine Wheel, Phish and The Cranberries. The former Cambridge graduate, responsible for so many great Pink Floyd covers as part of Hipgnosis, continued to work on album covers in the 90s, many of which displayed his outlandish photographic images. When Hipgnosis came to an end in 1983, Storm Thorgerson started a company making concert films and music videos, including works for Robert Plant, Kajagoogoo and Big Country. As the desire for lavish album covers waned in the early 80s, Hipgnosis switched to advertising and film work. Their album cover for The Dark Side Of The Moon, featuring white light splitting as it hits a black prism, is one of the most famous images in music. When we saw Sgt Pepper’s, we went, ‘Oh, my gosh, we can do this, but let’s think differently.’” Powell said: “We always tried to think laterally and not go for the obvious. Hipgnosis went on to produce nearly 200 covers, some of which were the most radical album sleeves in music history, including Black Sabbath’s escalator robots (for Technical Ecstasy) and Peter Gabriel’s melted grilled-cheese face (for his self-titled 1980 solo album). In the following decade, the company became pre-eminent among the most forward-thinking album covers designers in the world. Hipgnosis – a term mixing “hip” with “gnosis” (meaning “mystic thought”) – was coined by Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett for the design pairing of English art student friends Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell, when the band asked them to design the cover for their 1968 album, A Saucerful Of Secrets. ![]() Bubbles, who often worked using obscure pseudonyms (there may be some unknown Bubbles albums still out there), took his own life, at the age of 41, on what would have been his late parents’ wedding anniversary. Bubbles would incorporate different art styles and photography – as on the beautiful cover for Costello’s Armed Forces – and created album sleeves of cryptic intricacy. His early work included the cover for the triple-album Glastonbury Fayre, which opens out from a gatefold to a huge six-panel poster. He also worked on music visuals, including the striking Specials video for “Ghost Town.” Londoner Barney Bubbles, who changed his name legally from Colin Fulcher, trained at Twickenham Art College and worked at Terence Conran’s groundbreaking consultancy, before moving into record design.ĭuring the 70s and early 80s he created record sleeves, label logos, and music-related visuals for innovative musicians such as Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, Billy Bragg, and Ian Dury, for bands such as Hawkwind, and for companies including Stiff Records and the weekly NME. However, his modern jazz designs – some with stunning and wild typographical expression, such as Lee Morgan’s The Rumproller – created a superb legacy, marking Reid Miles out as one of the earliest album cover designers to take note of. In the 60s, Miles began to concentrate on photography and he became a hugely successful figure in advertising. As he once said: “Fifty bucks an album… they loved it, thought it was modern, they thought it went with the music… one or two colors to work with at that time, and some outrageous graphics!” He had small budgets and worked speedily. Miles was not a jazz fan and was thus able to stand back and analyze what would make a great cover, irrespective of the musician involved. Chicago-born Miles, who had been an Esquire magazine journalist before working in music, created a “hip” brand identity for Blue Note, which was the epitome of modern, cool, and progressive.
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