Style combination · Contrasts
Hipgnosis Photographic Concept Sleeve × Surrealist Graphics
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.
Mix them and make something Hipgnosis Photographic Concept Sleeve Surrealist Graphics
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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 Surrealist Graphics
- Type from Surrealist Graphics
- Colour from Hipgnosis Photographic Concept Sleeve
- Form from Surrealist Graphics
- Composition from Hipgnosis Photographic Concept Sleeve
- Surface from Hipgnosis Photographic Concept Sleeve
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02
The type
Open fonts standing in for each style’s own type, which is often hand-drawn or commercial.
Display · Surrealist Graphics
Sure.
Gloock; Surrealist Graphics used Artists' hand-lettered mastheads and Didone and Victorian display faces lifted from 19th-century catalogues
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 Hipgnosis Photographic Concept Sleeve, with a counter-accent from Surrealist Graphics. The ink reads on the ground at 4.5:1 or more.
Hipgnosis Photographic Concept Sleeve Surrealist Graphics
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#141414ground · 36% -
#eee8dcink · 14% -
#d8642caccent · 18% -
#a24a2aaccent · 14% -
#c9a46baccent · 10% -
#7fa6c8accent · 8%
As CSS
:root {
--ground: #141414;
--ink: #eee8dc;
--accent-1: #d8642c;
--accent-2: #a24a2a;
--accent-3: #c9a46b;
--accent-4: #7fa6c8;
--font-display: "Gloock", 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.
04
The two styles
05
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.
- 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.
- West German Conceptual Film & Culture Poster (Hillmann and Rambow) Pairs well · 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.
With Surrealist Graphics
- Corporate Identity Modernism Contrasts · Place a single dream image inside a strict corporate grid; the calm system heightens the strangeness.
- Isotype Pictorial Statistics Contrasts · Isotype's one-symbol-one-meaning is the antithesis of Surrealist ambiguity; decide whether the viewer should decode or be disturbed.
- Psychedelic Poster Pairs well · Psychedelic posters revived Surrealist dream imagery; combine them for hallucinatory figurative work with melting forms.
- Polish Poster School Pairs well · Polish poster artists fused Surrealist metaphor with painterly lettering; borrow the method for cultural posters built on one uncanny image.
- Post-Punk Record Sleeve (Stiff, Factory, 4AD) Pairs well · Vaughan Oliver drew on Dalí and Surrealism; add an uncanny juxtaposition to a blurred, textured 23 Envelope photograph for a dream-like sleeve.
- Brodovitch Editorial Design (Harper's Bazaar) Pairs well · Take its isolated body parts, torn edges and dreamlike juxtaposition, but apply them to the photographic spread.
- AIZ Political Photomontage (Heartfield) Pairs well · Surrealist photography also makes the impossible look photographed; take its dream logic when a brief needs strangeness, and add the AIZ headline and caption when that strangeness has to land a political point.
- Emblem Book (Motto, Picture & Epigram) Pairs well · Both find meaning in the gap between a picture and the words beside it; pair a framed, uncanny object with a terse motto above and a short verse below for an editorial series that asks to be decoded.