Hipgnosis

More than any other design company, Hipgnosis was responsible for the look of progressive rock. Their classic covers read like a list of the great rock albums of the '70s: all of Pink Floyd's covers from A Saucerful of Secrets through Animals, Led Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy and Presence, Genesis' The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway and Peter Gabriel's first three solo albums (including that magnificently creepy melting-face sleeve), Wings' Venus and Mars, 10cc's The Original Soundtrack, and many more. Partners Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell had been friendly with the members of the nascent Pink Floyd at school in Cambridge, a connection that led to Hipgnosis becoming the unofficial house designer for the Floyd's label, EMI's prog imprint Harvest Records. The Hipgnosis aesthetic favored a combination of surrealism and hyper-reality, creating lushly saturated photographs of inexplicable, dreamlike scenarios. Keeping current in the punkier late '70s, Thorgerson and Powell added longtime assistant Peter Christopherson (also a member of Throbbing Gristle) as a full partner in the firm, but with progressive rock's decline and the concurrent rise of typography-based modern designers like Malcolm Garrett or Peter Saville, Hipgnosis closed shop in 1983.