Hipgnosis, the designers who changed the record sleeve | Hacker News Reader

Hipgnosis, the designers who changed the record sleeve

theguardian.com

94 points8bitsrule33 comments

Also noteworthy that Hipgnosis artist Peter Christopherson (who's shown in the photo in the article but not otherwise mentioned) also happened to have gone on to be a founding member of Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV, and Coil and was a key figure in the history of industrial music.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Christopherson

His work as The Threshold HouseBoys Choir and with SoiSong is great too. But Coil is in my opinion the pinnacle of electronic music and one of the reasons is that they worked together with many other artists through their carreer. And since the Hacker News crowd is often interested in psychedelics, it's worth mentioning their collaboration with Drew McDowall, Time Machines, great music to trip to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efXXPYkBNuM

the one thing I think makes Coil stand out from everything else is just... they knew how their equipment works. The sounds they can get out of their gear is amazing, there's really nothing like them, even TG and PTV can't really match in terms of timbre / sound design / whatever you want to call it.

Coil (especially John Balance) were perfectionists. In interviews, they stressed the importance of continuous experimentation but also noted that they needed to impose extremely high standards and ruthlessly discard much of their output when it didn't make the cut (which was the majority of the time).

I remember reading an interview by Balance where he described their work as a modern take on the alchemical process of constant refinement. As far as album covers go, Love's Secret Domain [1] is a personal favorite.

It is a shame that this documentary doesn't include Christopherson.

[1] https://www.sorrystaterecords.com/cdn/shop/products/coil_0e4...

Hipgnosis is probably the archetype for this style. I'm also quite partial to Roger Dean's work from the same period. Most people know him for working with Yes but he also did artwork for a few Budgie albums including "Never Turn Your Back On A Friend" [1] as well as other artists. I also remember thinking that Avatar (2009) had an aesthetic similar to his art for "Fragile" only to discover later that he sued the production [2]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NeverTurnYourBackonaFri...

[2] http://copyright.nova.edu/avatar-lawsuit/

I never realised how hardcore Avatar went, in ripping off every possible Roger Deanism. That's amazing.

Worth thinking about in a world where I can tell Stable Diffusion to make Deanisms all day long. I've experimented by trying to make Deanisms but adding concepts like mechanical or robot or cyberspace. I've also generated stuff much more randomly, but combed over it with an eye for picking out Hipgnosis-like output.

There's bound to be a borderline between making swoopy organic shapes and lines of motion and hallucinatory imagery, and ripping off specific layouts and executions of that general idea. I'm comfortable with the idea that Avatar straddles that line covering both sides of it, but less comfortable with the idea that anything I could ever do that's swoopy, organic, and imaginary-looking is the product of Roger Dean. I should be able to run with that and expand on it, but can Stable Diffusion? What if it hadn't been fed Dean's work, and still is coaxed into doing similar things? Not like Stable Diffusion really understands gravity…

I put out a song the other day (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IID8BR4s5Xc) which uses an image from Stable Diffusion, expanded with Topaz AI, as the 'album cover' for the song. From the beginning I saw that image as potentially useful for something (much like how Hipgnosis worked with their images) and thought it perfectly matched that particular song and grabbed it, adding text in Clip Studio Paint to accentuate the image and underscore what it appeared to be.

I don't remember whether 'storm thorgerson' was among the words in the prompt, but I know I've run prompts invoking Dean, Storm, Dali, Cezanne, Mondrian… these are murky waters. I feel that I can pretty easily get Hipgnosis-like imagery, or Dean-like imagery, out of Stable Diffusion. The question is whether you can get something distinctive and not a total ripoff, or whether you're stuck making bad ripoffs. For instance if you tell Stable Diffusion to do 'Giger' it immediately takes over the prompt and everything's a bad Giger ripoff. But, what about 'sunny meadow Giger'?

Because it's just too relevant, I'm forced to link to a blog post I did a while back where I did some Yes / Dean inspired play with Stable Diffusion. I really liked the results. A full "music video" for Close to the Edge is somewhere down the middle of my long list of project ideas. I ran the numbers at some point and figured I could generate all the video with Replicate for $100 or so, which is expensive... but I'm enough of a Yes fan that it might be worth it to me.

https://epiccoleman.com/posts/2023-03-05-deforum-stable-diff...

For a time it seemed that every album I bought was Roger Dean.

Yes (esp Tales from Topographic Oceans), Budgie, and Osibisa.

Oh and Uriah Heep!

Roger Dean also has a few books of his work https://www.thriftbooks.com/a/roger-dean/357333/

I have Views (used to have the other ones) and it also takes a nice look at his architectural work as well as album art https://www.rogerdean.com/architectural-designs

As if the 'plot' of Avatar wasn't already entirely derivative of earlier films like Dances with Wolves and Fern Gully, it turns out they ripped off their visual aesthetic from Roger Dean as well. James Cameron should be ashamed of not giving credit to the earlier works who so heavily inspired his.

Didn't he also do the inner ring album art for virgin records? I'm sure he's credited on the six finger "V" compilation album.

He did, indeed. At least until they replaced the "two virgins and a dragon" with the "more modern" V logo.

I was trying to find a connection between this outfit and the gaming company Psygnosis and I learned that this artist straddled the two: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Dean_(artist)

Do not miss out on the man’s homepage either, it contains plenty of his work:

https://www.rogerdean.com

It even has some fascinating architecture on it; he also has some decent testimonials.

The house was a design for a "planned eco-village" called Willowater in the 1970s, way ahead of its time.

I'd love to build a house like that, not least because I hate plastering corners.

Hipgnosis did original hitchhikers novel cover: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_...

In my teens, just I was learning Photoshop (early 2000), I got a copy of their book The Photo designs of Hipgnosis: The Goodbye Look. I was mind blown of things by seeing that could be done to an image without a computer. For a burn effect actually burn things!

The only thing that I miss about LPs is the glory of four square feet of art.

I had a copy of the Tusk double LP. Each disc came in its own inner sleeve, giving eight full surfaces of art, and they used it to the fullest.

> There are interviews, too, with Peter Saville, best known for his sleek and minimalist design work with Joy Division and New Order, and something of a counterweight to Hipgnosis who, after all, mainly worked in a time of great musical excess.

Peter Saville helped design Jony Ive's "LoveFrom" typeface: https://www.wallpaper.com/design-interiors/corporate-design-...

Wrong dating of this article.

> "Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis) premieres at the Sundance film festival on Friday, and is in cinemas and on-demand from 14 July."

It really premiered at Telluride 5.Sep 2022, then went on to Sundance Spotlights and is now released. https://cannes-ratings.tk/Sundance?t=158#158

And so, all these years later, I finally learn who is being referred to by the tiny credit on the cover of my copy of THHGTTG. They did the LP too, I discover, although I don't own the LP. I do own the towel though, and I know exactly where it is. (-:

Where is it streaming? I could only find something about Roku Free, whatever that is?

This Roku link appears to just be the trailer which is also in the Guardian article through Youtube

https://therokuchannel.roku.com/details/cb98cdb24594e3960bc9...

The official web site for the movie only shows "iTunes Store"

https://www.squaringthecirclefilm.com/

EDIT:

I just found it on the iTunes store but it is listed as "Pre-Order" for $14.99

I had to scroll way down, there are so many other things showing up for "squaring the circle" or "hipgnosis" but it is in the "Movies" section

But why does Peter Saville seem to believe 15 year olds do not like giant inflatable animals hovering overhead? When I was 15 I would have enjoyed that much more that I would now, as an adult.

https://archive.ph/fYquB

> It is Gallagher who, citing his daughter, argues that there is a lack of recognition of the album cover among younger generations, blaming factors including reduced budgets and the smaller picture formats used by streaming platforms.

I think the latter is an attribution error. I'd say it's more the change in consumption patterns brought about by format changes.

Now I'm not a consumer of vinyls, my experience is mostly with my father's collection of LPs, but my recollection is that first not all sleeves have spines, so unless you know exactly where each of them is when looking for an album you need to pull it out, check the front cover and put it back, thus you quite quickly associate covers with albums. Furthermore if you have a mix of spined and spineless sleeves you might just pull all of them to make the movement more regular. Second getting the LP out of the sleeve is a process, during which the cover is likely the thing you most see (unless it's a box set with plain sleeves), and third most spineless sleeves are pretty flimsy so you need to store them carefully when empty, which usually means laying them flat next to the record player, with the cover in full view.

Those are all opportunities for the cover to shine.

The CD already started changing that, a crystal case always has a spine (the only CDs without spines I had were low-quality bulk CD-Rs, as well as a few Verbatim spindles and boxes, but those were completely naked) so to find a CD you just go through the spines, pattern matching the art & font then checking on the actual printed name. Then a CD's case and a CD are quite resilient, you open the case, grab the CD by the edges and put it in the player, closing the case and chucking it. As long as you don't throw the case across the floor it'll make it, so there's little care required.

This means you can see the cover a fair bit, and some CD-era covers are still iconic, but there's a lot less opportunity for it to shine, and a lot less space as well (an LP sleeve has 10 times the surface as a CD case). Plus a CD gets you more playtime with less interaction alongside the smaller format, much unlike EP and LPs: up to 72mn without getting next to the record, where an LP (or EP) would require either flipping to the B side (an opportunity to see the cover) or swapping after the end of A (even more cover time).

But then came the turn of the millenium, with media players and PMPs. Technically you could show album art in most media players but then that'd increase the space taken by the track, sizing was inconsistent between viewers, and most of the time you'd just chuck a playlist in and put it in the background so why bother? PMPs were worse as they simply didn't have the capability to show album art (I assume portable CD players were similar). The oddballs buying official MD releases might have album art on the go, but the format would be even smaller than on a CD case (about 1/3rd the surface).

Outside of stores, I'm not sure I saw an album cover between 2000 (or realistically a bit earlier) and 2008 when I got my first iphone and the rare embedded album cover would grace the music application's screen. But then the media player problem raises its head, if I'm looking at my phone while listening to music, it's probably to do something else with it, so it's not like I can see the album art. Likewise when listening to my music in the car, usually I've got navigation going on on the display, not album art.

Streaming is really just a continuation of that, and the death of the album which has been ongoing since the displacement of the CD started.

Though if anything I'd say I see more and higher-resolution album covers these days: on youtube at least it seems common for artists to use the album cover (sometimes playful variations thereof) as the video frame for tracks which don't rate an MV (outside of music.youtube.com, mind), so this is visible when putting youtube on a side display for music.

It didn't always work that way. Only the people with bookcase style storage had to squint at the spine labels. (-:

There were, at the time (and still are, a quick trip to Bing informs me), flip storage containers that one could buy, meaning that one didn't have to read the spines, just flip backwards and forwards looking at the faces. CD jewel cases are less amenable to this sort of flip-storage, and have a tendency to self-right since they have flat bases.

That is essentially the same result: browsing through your vinyl collection was / is normally done by looking at the cover.

Not so much with CDs.

And with dematerialised content... it could be (there are views which show covers, and to this day I try to tag albums with their covers at least when I copy them to my phone) but why bother when you can just look for the artist, album, or track you want to listen to directly?

These are not because of

> the smaller picture formats used by streaming platforms.

is my point.

I've never quite understood why website-of-the-album - or even website-of-the-single - never became a mainstream idea. You could include all of the usual vinyl artwork and content in an accessible format. But you could add far more - more art, essays, making-of stories, graphics, lyrics, session photography, tour photography, artistic photography, maybe some offcuts and early versions, and so on.

It sort of did until the first Dot COM Bubble burst. There were also "Enhanced CDs" with both audio and data on them, and lots of other such gimmicks.

It is telling to note that whilst one can still read the CD and LP inserts, WWW sites like http://www.friendsoflive.com and http://www.noangels.tv have long since vanished. So I suspect that the world has got past this being a mainstream idea, learning how ephemeral it turns out to be in practice. After all, what good is "collector stuff" if it just ups and randomly vanishes out of the collection after a few years?

Blue book CDs were quite cool, IIRC small-ish games would give you the OST as music tracks when they had enough space left over.

> "...went on to shoot and make music videos for the likes of Depeche Mode, U2, the Killers and REM..."

Every time someone writes REM instead of R.E.M., a little kitten gets hurt. But then again, everybody hurts sometimes...

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