A Look Back on the Golden Age of Album Cover Art with Hipgnosis
One of the many nice things about the vinyl resurrection is that people are once again starting to pay attention to album cover art. Fast Company looks at the work of Hipgnosis, a British firm responsible for some of the most iconic album covers of all time.
From 1972 to 1986, London-based photography and design studio Hipgnosis—made up of Aubrey “Po” Powell, Storm Thorgerson, and Peter Christopherson—created some of the most recognizable album covers in rock music history. Their rainbow-through-a-prism graphic for Pink Floyd’s “The Dark Side of the Moon” became a logo of sorts for prog-heads, plastered on the T-shirts of Syd Barrett-worshipping teenagers to this day. From the gold-toned collage of children clamoring over the Giant’s Causeway on Led Zeppelin’s “Houses of the Holy” to Peter Gabriel’s creepily disintegrating face on “Melt,” Hipgnosis’s hallucinatory imagery was the visual equivalent of these bands’ maximalist riffs and psychedelic explorations.
