Style combination · Pairs well

Hipgnosis Photographic Concept Sleeve × Pop Art Graphics

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.

From the research on Hipgnosis Photographic Concept Sleeve

Mix them and make something Hipgnosis Photographic Concept Sleeve Pop Art Graphics

A sample layout drawn from the recipe: shapes from Hipgnosis Photographic Concept Sleeve, their arrangement from Hipgnosis Photographic Concept Sleeve, the finish from Pop Art Graphics. Not a real work, and not an image of either style.

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 Pop Art Graphics

Type from Pop Art Graphics: Hand-lettering
Type as image

Hipgnosis Photographic Concept Sleeve avoids type as image: this is where the two pull against each other.
Colour from Pop Art Graphics: Primary triad
Flat fields
Form from Hipgnosis Photographic Concept Sleeve: Naturalistic depiction
Ornament-free
Composition from Hipgnosis Photographic Concept Sleeve: Full bleed
Single focal point
Surface from Pop Art Graphics: Halftone & Ben-Day dots
Hard offset shadow

Hipgnosis Photographic Concept Sleeve avoids halftone & ben-day dots: this is where the two pull against each other.

The type

Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.

Display · Pop Art Graphics

Yay!

Bangers; Pop Art Graphics used Comic-book hand lettering and Franklin Gothic

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

The colours

The ground and leading colours come from Pop Art Graphics, 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 Pop Art Graphics

#fbf8f0 ground · 36%
#111111 ink · 14%
#ffd400 accent · 18%
#d8642c accent · 14%
#e10600 accent · 10%
#c9a46b accent · 8%

As CSS

:root {
  --ground: #fbf8f0;
  --ink: #111111;
  --accent-1: #ffd400;
  --accent-2: #d8642c;
  --accent-3: #e10600;
  --accent-4: #c9a46b;
  --font-display: "Bangers", 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.