William Selden
Peter Saville
Iconic Graphic Designer By Stewart MasonDefined album cover design in the 1980s, creating wonderfully tactile and pleasurable sleeves sometimes more worthwhile than the music they contained.
Alongside Vaughan Oliver's spookily atmospheric 4AD Records work, Peter Saville defined 1980s album cover design. Combining a brilliant sense of typography and layout with an exquisite eye for detail, his sleeves were wonderfully tactile and pleasurable objects, sometimes more worthwhile than the music they contained. His groundbreaking work for Factory Records also featured a puckish sense of conceptual humor: it was Saville who instituted Factory's legendarily all-inclusive numbering system when he decreed that his poster for Tony Wilson's first club night under that name was FAC 1. (Later catalogue entries included FAC 191, the cat that lived in the label-owned nightclub The Hacienda, itself numbered FAC 51.)
Besides iconic Factory work like Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures and New Order's "Blue Monday" single, Saville was also head designer at Virgin's short-lived post-punk imprint Dindisc Records, designing sleeves for the Monochrome Set and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. More mainstream work included covers for Roxy Music's Flesh and Blood and Peter Gabriel's So. In the 1990s, Saville moved into commercial advertising and high fashion, maintaining his trademark elegance for clients like Smart automobiles and the British department store Selfridges, and collaborating with designers like Yohji Yamamoto and Raf Simons.
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Music Review
Always Now
Section 25 -
Music Review
Blue Monday
New Order -
Music Review
Power, Corruption and Lies
New Order -
Music Review
Strange Boutique
The Monochrome Set -
Music Review
Unknown Pleasures
Joy Division
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Music Profile
Factory Records Iconic British Indie Label
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Music Profile
Joy Division Music Group
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Music Profile
New Order Music Group
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Culture Profile
Raf Simons Belgian Fashion Designer
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Music Profile
Section 25 Music Group
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Culture Profile
Yohji Yamamoto Groundbreaking Japanese Fashion Designer
By Ranjani GopalarathinamYamamoto's designs allow fashionable women to be playfully intellectual and… >>
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TV & Film Review
24 Hour Party People
Michael WinterbottomDecadent and puckish, 24 Hour Party People is essential viewing… >>
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Culture Review
A Basket of Roses
Henri Fantin-Latour -
Books Review
Designed by Peter Saville
Rick Poynor -
Culture Profile
Malcolm Garrett New Wave Album Cover Designer
By Stewart MasonDesigned era-defining graphics for new wave and new romantic acts… >>
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Culture Profile
Bauhaus Modern Design School
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Culture Profile
Jan Tschichold Modern Typographer
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Culture Profile
Modernism Artistic Movement
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Books Review
Pioneers of Modern Typography
Herbert Spencer -
Culture Profile
Tony Wilson TV Presenter, Label Owner, Raconteur
