Pink Floyd put as much care into what you see as into what you hear. Their covers hang in galleries, and the stories behind them are almost as good as the records.
A beam of white light through a triangle. Design brief: "sophisticated, neat, with a bit of edge." No rainbow on the front cover of the most colorful band in rock — restraint as confidence. Found on t-shirts worn by people who have never heard the album.
Their first Hipgnosis cover and the firm's first commercial commission ever: a kinetic collage of planets, fingerprints and a Doctor Strange comic panel. Psychedelia as graphic design, not tie-dye.
A cow named Lulubelle, photographed in a Foulness field, on the cover with no band name and no album name. Thorgerson wanted "something out of place" — the most expensive joke in British design at the time, and a small masterpiece.
An ear, a face in profile, a dog behind glass in a studio — a study of listening itself, photographed with a blue-tinted lens. The inner sleeve continues the face motif. Understated on purpose, between the early records and the breakthrough.
A blank white brick wall, Gerald Scarfe's animation and the hammers. One of the few Pink Floyd covers with almost no photography — the drawing does the work, and the film made the wall a character in its own right.
Battersea Power Station, an inflatable pig named Algie floating between the chimneys — which broke loose on the shoot and drifted over Kent, briefly closing Heathrow to flights. The empty version is on the cover; the pig was composited in.
Nearly everyone important — Waters, Gilmour, Wright, Thorgerson, Powell, Scarborough — grew up within miles of each other. The visual identity of the band was built by school friends, not agencies.
The burning man on Wish You Were Here, the empty prism frame, Syd himself: the covers, like the songs, keep pointing at what is missing.
Hipgnosis largely refused to draw. Real pigs in real skies, real cows in real fields — believing that a photograph lies more interestingly than a painting.
The 1966 UFO club shows used oil-slides and tinted bulbs before anyone had an album to light up. Sound and image were married in the room, not in the marketing.
“I don’t want to illustrate the record. I want to make an image that stands on its own and somehow belongs to the music.” — Storm Thorgerson, paraphrased from his collected work “Eye of the Storm”