Nov 2: Hipgnosis

Hipgnosis were a design agency who created a huge number of album covers.

Their Wikipedia page contains a wealth of information and a list of the albums they worked on. I have a great many of them.

I have this book on the agency which I bought at the shop at the V&A Pink Floyd exhibition of props and other items. It contains a complete collection of everything they worked on.

They designed this logo for Led Zeppelin in 1973 for example.

They created a range of familiar logos and other imagery that will be familiar to music fans (particularly those of a certain age i.e. old like me).

In 1974, they redesigned the Genesis logo for their work on 'The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway'. 

I used to have this as a badge on my Italian combat jacket that was all the range back in the early 1980s and which I used to wear all the time.

When first starting out, Aubrey Powell and Storm Thorgerson (who co-founded the agency) adopted their name from graffiti they found on the door to their apartment. Thorgerson said they liked the word, not only for punning on "hypnosis", but for possessing "a nice sense of contradiction, of an impossible co-existence, from Hip = new, cool, and groovy, and gnosis, relating to ancient learning".

Aubrey Powell was a former pupil at the school where I teach, which makes him an Old Elean.

What is your favourite album cover of theirs?