Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon - 1973
Pink Floyd, in their infinite wisdom, perused our 7 complex detailed roughs for this cover in a drab basement room at Abbey Road – submissions over which we at Hipgnosis had toiled for weeks – but managed to decide within 3 minutes which one they liked. No amount of cajoling would get them to consider any other contender, nor endure further explanation of the prism, or how exactly it might look.
‘That’s it’, they said in unison, ‘we’ve got to get back to real work’, and returned forthwith to the studio upstairs. To look back now and reflect upon how the actual artwork itself had no colour, being just a tint lay, and how the spectrum was missing a colour anyway, and how the whole design was only cobbled from a standard physics textbook diagram .... all of this just goes to show how such matters pale if a design feels ‘appropriate’. - Storm Thorgerson (via MediaBitch, his PR firm)
Pink Floyd, in their infinite wisdom, perused our 7 complex detailed roughs for this cover in a drab basement room at Abbey Road – submissions over which we at Hipgnosis had toiled for weeks – but managed to decide within 3 minutes which one they liked. No amount of cajoling would get them to consider any other contender, nor endure further explanation of the prism, or how exactly it might look.
‘That’s it’, they said in unison, ‘we’ve got to get back to real work’, and returned forthwith to the studio upstairs. To look back now and reflect upon how the actual artwork itself had no colour, being just a tint lay, and how the spectrum was missing a colour anyway, and how the whole design was only cobbled from a standard physics textbook diagram .... all of this just goes to show how such matters pale if a design feels ‘appropriate’. - Storm Thorgerson (via MediaBitch, his PR firm)