Style combination · Pairs well
Hipgnosis Photographic Concept Sleeve × West German Conceptual Film
Hipgnosis also builds impossible scenes for the camera and lets the photograph vouch for them; add Rambow's plain ground and one line of set grotesque when such a staged photo has to work as a street poster rather than a record sleeve.
Mix them and make something Hipgnosis Photographic Concept Sleeve West German Conceptual Film
01
What each style brings
Each part of the design comes from the style with the stronger say in it, and each style gives at least two.
Hipgnosis Photographic Concept Sleeve West German Conceptual Film & Culture Poster (Hillmann and Rambow)
- Type from West German Conceptual Film
- Colour from West German Conceptual Film
- Form from Hipgnosis Photographic Concept Sleeve
- Composition from Hipgnosis Photographic Concept Sleeve
- Surface from West German Conceptual Film
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The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · West German Conceptual Film
Hello
Inter Tight, standing in for Condensed bold grotesque for titles, set tight and often stacked (Panzerkreuzer Potemkin, 1967; Sturm über Asien; Der Malteser Falke, 1972; Rambow's Die Hamletmaschine, 1980)
Text · Hipgnosis Photographic Concept Sleeve
The sleeves the London studio Hipgnosis made for Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Genesis, Peter Gabriel, 10cc and others from 1968 to 1983. The front is rarely a band portrait or a title: it is a staged photograph of an impossible or deadpan event in a real place, often a pun on the title or a lyric, finished by hand in the darkroom with multiple printing, tinting and cut-and-paste long before Photoshop. George Hardie's crisp pen-and-ink graphics, stickers and inner sleeves carry what lettering there is. Thorgerson carried the idiom on after 1983, as on The Division Bell (1994).
Inter; Hipgnosis Photographic Concept Sleeve used Technical pen-and-ink logo and Rubber-stamped title on brown paper
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The colours
The ground and leading colours come from West German Conceptual Film, with a counter-accent from Hipgnosis Photographic Concept Sleeve. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Hipgnosis Photographic Concept Sleeve West German Conceptual Film & Culture Poster (Hillmann and Rambow)
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#ece7dcground · 36% -
#1b1b1bink · 14% -
#d4441daccent · 18% -
#2f3f8faccent · 14% -
#c9a46baccent · 10% -
#908a82accent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #ece7dc;
--ink: #1b1b1b;
--accent-1: #d4441d;
--accent-2: #2f3f8f;
--accent-3: #c9a46b;
--accent-4: #908a82;
--font-display: "Inter Tight", sans-serif;
--font-text: "Inter", sans-serif;
}Use it with care
Hipgnosis Photographic Concept Sleeve: The sleeves, their photographs and the Dark Side of the Moon prism are in copyright and the archive is held privately by Aubrey Powell: stage and photograph your own pun rather than recreating a Hipgnosis image, and never present a design as a Hipgnosis, Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin cover. Some sleeves rest on nudity, including two young children on Houses of the Holy, or on jokes Thorgerson himself later called 'not exactly the most politically correct' (Lovedrive) and 'quite sexist' (Technical Ecstasy): borrow the staging and the wit, not those subjects.
West German Conceptual Film & Culture Poster (Hillmann and Rambow): Some posters turn Nazi imagery against itself: a swastika of broken pencils over the 1938 member list of the exiled German PEN (P.E.N. im Exil, 1983) and an egg given Hitler's forelock and moustache (Sein oder Nichtsein, 1964). Displaying Nazi symbols is restricted by law in Germany and several other countries outside contexts such as art, satire, education and history, so keep any such sign unmistakably critical and check the rules where the work will be shown. Rambow's Othello poster (1978) appears to show a face in dark stage make-up, the blackface convention for the role that is now widely rejected: do not borrow it. The posters and their photographs (Hillmann, Rambow, Lienemeyer, van de Sand, Abisag Tüllmann) are in copyright: stage and photograph your own object or cut your own silhouette instead of recreating a poster.
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The two styles
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More combinations
With Hipgnosis Photographic Concept Sleeve
- ECM Sleeve Aesthetic (Munich) Pairs well · Both keep the musicians and most of the type off the front and let one photograph of a wide landscape carry the record; ECM leaves it wintry and still, Hipgnosis puts an absurd event in it. Add ECM's silence and tiny type to a Hipgnosis concept for a quieter, stranger cover.
- Post-Punk Record Sleeve (Stiff, Factory, 4AD) Contrasts · The generation that made it look dated: post-punk designers quoted one found image and coded or shrank the type, where Hipgnosis paid for elaborate location shoots and darkroom work. Choose between quoting a picture and staging one.
- Psychedelic Poster Contrasts · Same Pink Floyd scene, opposite answer: Hipgnosis's 1969 Royal Festival Hall poster is still a psychedelic dreamscape collage, but by Atom Heart Mother the band wanted 'something plain' and got a cow. Swap melting hand-lettering and vibrating colour for one calm photograph and almost no type.
- Pop Art Graphics Pairs well · Atom Heart Mother's cow is said to have been inspired by Warhol's cow wallpaper: take pop's deadpan, single everyday subject, photograph it in a real landscape instead of screenprinting it, and let the absence of a title make it strange.
- Surrealist Graphics Contrasts · The parent: Thorgerson said he took from Magritte 'a sort of love of oddity' and of 'juxtaposition or contrariness' (Tate, 2011). The Surrealists built the uncanny from engraving collage, painting and darkroom tricks for magazines and galleries; Hipgnosis staged it as a full-colour location photograph on a mass-market record and played it for a pun. Choose surrealism for dream and desire, Hipgnosis for a deadpan joke that could almost be real.
- Dutch Expressive Postmodernism (Studio Dumbar & Hard Werken) Contrasts · Studio Dumbar also built scenes and photographed them, but filled the set with mismatched type and flat modernist shapes; Hipgnosis kept the lettering off the picture and made the scene look plausible. Choose between a visibly constructed set and a believable impossibility.
- PC Music Graphics Contrasts · Both take an idea literally and push it until it turns strange, but Hipgnosis staged it in a real place with a camera, while PC Music renders a synthetic product on a blank field.
With West German Conceptual Film
- Basel Object Poster (Swiss Sachplakat) Contrasts · Both isolate one object on a plain ground, but Basel paints a product in glossy lithographic realism to sell it; here the object stands for a film's theme, is cut to a flat silhouette or a grainy photograph, and rarely flatters.
- AIZ Political Photomontage (Heartfield) Pairs well · Heartfield tied four bloody axes into a swastika in 1934; Rambow's broken pencils laid into a swastika over a 1938 PEN list (1983) make the same move of an object turned into an emblem. Borrow the AIZ caption when the poster must accuse, and Rambow's wordless object when it should commemorate.
- Polish Poster School Contrasts · Its contemporary in art-film posters: the Polish school paints the metaphor and letters the title by hand in loose brushwork; take the Kassel route when the same single idea should come from a cropped photograph or a hard silhouette with set grotesque type.
- Cuban Revolutionary Poster (OSPAAAL & ICAIC) Contrasts · The ICAIC film posters of revolutionary Cuba also read a film metaphorically and reduce it to one silhouette or visual pun in screenprint, but they let flat, saturated, Pop and psychedelic colour carry the energy and draw or hand-cut the title letters; the Kassel poster mostly keeps to black and one or two inks, a photograph or a hard silhouette and set grotesque type.
- International Typographic Style Contrasts · Shares the set grotesque, flat inks and ornament-free ground, but rejects Swiss objectivity: each poster carries one visual metaphor and a new typographic choice per film instead of a grid and a neutral system.
- French Post-War Visual-Gag Poster (Savignac, Villemot, Morvan) Contrasts · Savignac's visual gag is drawn and painted to make people smile at a product; the Kassel poster finds its pun in photographs and silhouettes, and its humour is darker and aimed at a film's or play's subject.
- Saul and Elaine Bass Conceptual Film Graphics Contrasts · Hillmann's posters also refuse star portraits and reduce a film to one sign, but they are static sheets set in grotesque type that often find the sign in a grainy photograph; Bass draws and cuts the sign by hand and builds it as a moving title before it becomes a poster.
- Israeli Political Poster (Tartakover to Lemel) Contrasts · Both can concentrate a poster into a photographed paradox and a set sans-serif title; choose the Israeli dissenting core when Hebrew slogans, national visual memory and the artist as critical witness must carry the argument, rather than a sign extracted from a film or play. Lemel's exhibition and pandemic images remain points of overlap, not a uniquely Israeli photographic technique.