Hipgnosis and the Classic LP Cover
It’s hard to say which is the most iconic album cover ever, but if one were to make a list of candidates Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon would have to be up there. But Dark Side is not just a lucky design; the designers behind the cover have hundreds more to their name, including for Led Zeppelin, Yes, Def Leppard, AC/DC, Peter Gabriel, Genesis, and many others.
Hipgnosis is the name of the design group behind the prism. Designers Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell began the London-based design studio in the late 1960s, and their output into the early 1980s helped establish album cover design as an art in itself.
Until the psychedelic revolution of the later 1960s, the primary purpose of record album covers was to drive record sales. For pop and rock formats, cover designs usually featured images of the performers on the cover. Hipgnosis’s cover designs represent a shift away from images of performers. Their work expanded the importance of the album cover as an artistic contribution to the overall product, not merely “packaging” that helped the record sell.
The 1970s peak of Hipgnosis coincided with the peak of vinyl LP albums as a music format. By the 1970s the rock generation had grown up, and many moved away from buying the cheaper 45rpm singles—which had defined the teen rock market in the 50s and 60s—in favor of the larger, more expensive (and more “adult”) LP albums. The music that took advantage of the expanded market for LPs in the 1970s is sometimes referred to as “album-oriented rock.”
Progressive rock in particular fit well into the album-oriented market. Prog rockers preferred musical abstraction and symbolism over more simple and direct styles of rock, and this aesthetic preference gave cover designers greater freedom to experiment with what the album cover should do and how it related to the music on the album.
The result for Hipgnosis was often covers that both unsettled and enticed the viewer. In Rolling Stone in 1979, rock critic Greil Marcus described Hipgnosis’s style as “remarkably clean, focused visual approach, guiding the eye in order to displace the viewer, to skew perspective by setting up and then subverting expectations. Often you have to look twice to register what you’re seeing, and that draws you in.”
Rather than an advertisement for the music within or the performer’s image, Thorgerson understood his designs as a visualisation of the music itself, something parallel to—and equally meaningful as—the music on the album. As Thorgerson explained: “I listen to the music, read the lyrics, speak to the musicians as much as possible. I see myself as a kind of translator, translating an audio event—the music—into a visual event—the cover.”
Indeed, many of the covers by Hipgnosis make you ask a question. They use the power of ambiguity and juxtaposition not to tell you what’s inside, but rather to provoke our imaginings about the musical world we might encounter within.
For more on Hipgnosis and Storm Thorgerson, check out Mike Alleyne’s article “After the Storm: Hipgnosis, Storm Thorgerson, and the Rock Album Cover.”
