Collage and Vinyl
Hipgnosis was a design team formed in London in 1967, known for creating incredibly cool album covers. They brought bold, progressive, and seemingly impossible ideas to life, often using collage techniques (in the absence of Photoshop) to realize their groundbreaking concepts. However, they didn’t just rely on cutting and pasting to execute their surreal visions. For instance, they once swept sand dunes in the Sahara for the perfect album cover, while a team of Moroccans spent the night inflating red balloons to be photographed the next day.
They worked with iconic bands like Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Genesis, Peter Gabriel, Black Sabbath, and many more. Aubrey Powell and Storm Thorgerson, two friends, started out designing covers for cowboy stories and thrillers at a publishing house. Young Powell, at the time, was delivering lighting equipment for the then-emerging Pink Floyd, which consisted of a few floor lamps and a projector that cast colored glass for the psychedelic effects. This connection led to their first album cover commission: designing the cover for Pink Floyd’s second album, A Saucerful of Secrets, in 1968. The album's success, combined with the practicality of the band's manager (who also hired them to design covers for other bands he managed), launched their company.
The name Hipgnosis came from Syd Barrett, who coined the word during one of his frequent "mind-altered" moments. Their workload ramped up in 1973 when Peter Christopherson joined the team. With bands now making big money, they had more control over the increasingly important album cover designs, which gave Hipgnosis more creative freedom. The designers became friends with many of the bands they worked with. It was a passionate, and at times heated, collaboration—sometimes a creative disagreement would result in something flying out the window—but it was also a productive partnership that lasted 15 years.
“The late '70s was the most hedonistic period in the music industry,” Powell later said. They eventually closed shop in 1982.
In 2017, Powell (the last surviving member of the trio at the time) compiled 480 album covers along with their stories and published them in a book.
They worked with iconic bands like Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Genesis, Peter Gabriel, Black Sabbath, and many more. Aubrey Powell and Storm Thorgerson, two friends, started out designing covers for cowboy stories and thrillers at a publishing house. Young Powell, at the time, was delivering lighting equipment for the then-emerging Pink Floyd, which consisted of a few floor lamps and a projector that cast colored glass for the psychedelic effects. This connection led to their first album cover commission: designing the cover for Pink Floyd’s second album, A Saucerful of Secrets, in 1968. The album's success, combined with the practicality of the band's manager (who also hired them to design covers for other bands he managed), launched their company.
The name Hipgnosis came from Syd Barrett, who coined the word during one of his frequent "mind-altered" moments. Their workload ramped up in 1973 when Peter Christopherson joined the team. With bands now making big money, they had more control over the increasingly important album cover designs, which gave Hipgnosis more creative freedom. The designers became friends with many of the bands they worked with. It was a passionate, and at times heated, collaboration—sometimes a creative disagreement would result in something flying out the window—but it was also a productive partnership that lasted 15 years.
“The late '70s was the most hedonistic period in the music industry,” Powell later said. They eventually closed shop in 1982.
In 2017, Powell (the last surviving member of the trio at the time) compiled 480 album covers along with their stories and published them in a book.
