Storm Thorgerson designed record sleeves for more than four decades and produced over a hundred album designs, and he came to the work from film rather than from graphic design – which explains almost everything about his method. He did not draw. He staged things and photographed them. Here is his training, the studios he founded, the bands he worked for and the principle he worked by.

Film school, not art school

Thorgerson read English and Philosophy at the University of Leicester, taking an honours degree, and then studied Film and Television at the Royal College of Art, where he took a master’s. That is a director’s training, not a designer’s, and it accounts for the fact that his sleeves are productions – location, cast, props, crew – rather than compositions.

He stated the principle himself as clearly as anyone could want: he liked photography because it is a reality medium, unlike drawing, and what he wanted to do was bend reality. That is the whole method in one sentence. An impossible thing that has plainly been photographed rather than painted asks the viewer a different question, and the answer to that question is what his work is for.

The three studios

He co-founded Hipgnosis with Aubrey Powell in 1968, the partnership later joined by Peter Christopherson. After the firm dissolved in 1983 he and Powell founded Greenback Films, concentrating on music video – a logical move for two people whose still images had always been staged like film sets, and a necessary one as the twelve-inch sleeve lost its place as the industry’s main visual surface. In the early 1990s he launched Storm Studios with Peter Curzon, working alongside photographers, designers, illustrators and retouchers.

Three organisations across forty years, each one a response to what the industry was paying for at the time. That is a more accurate picture of a working designer’s life than the usual account of a visionary attached to one band.

Pink Floyd

The association runs from A Saucerful of Secrets in 1968 through to compilations released in 2011 – more than four decades with one group. Its best-known product is the sleeve for The Dark Side of the Moon (1973), which is regularly named among the greatest album covers ever made. On that release the printed credits give sleeve design and photography to Hipgnosis and sleeve art to George Hardie, which is the standard shape of a Hipgnosis job and a useful correction to the habit of attributing the whole thing to one person.

Beyond Pink Floyd

He designed for Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Muse, The Mars Volta and Catherine Wheel among many others, across more than a hundred albums. The span matters: a designer whose work is remembered as belonging to one era of British rock in fact kept working for bands two and three generations younger, using the same method.

The books, and the name on the award

He wrote several books documenting the history of album art, including Classic Album Covers of the 60s in 1989 and The Gathering Storm in 2013. Prog magazine’s Grand Design Award carries his name, which is an unusual form of recognition – a professional award named for a sleeve designer, in a field where sleeve designers are normally uncredited in the public mind.

The method, and its limits

Building the thing and photographing it produces a specific kind of image and rules out others. What it gives is credibility: the viewer knows, at some level below argument, that this was assembled and stood in front of a camera, and an impossible arrangement that has evidently been built is stranger than one that has been drawn. What it costs is control and money. A painter can adjust anything at any point; a photographic production commits to a location, a set of objects and a day of weather, and fixing a mistake means doing it again.

That trade explains why the approach has so few successors. It requires a client willing to fund a small film shoot for a record sleeve, and that client stopped existing when the format shrank and the budgets went with it. The work is admired constantly and imitated almost never, and the reason is economic rather than artistic.

A note on what this piece does not do

There are no descriptions of the images here, and that is a deliberate rule for this whole section. The work is about the designers, the methods and the records they signed. What a given sleeve looks like is not something I am going to reproduce in words, and it is the one part of this subject that nobody needs help with.

Go deeper

The studio itself is covered in Hipgnosis, the other great designer of the era in Roger Dean, and the whole section is indexed in the artists behind prog’s album covers. For the band, start with the best Pink Floyd albums, for the argument about its two halves Waters against Gilmour, and for the records more broadly the best progressive rock albums of all time. The British scene is the subject of Beyond the Thames, the second book in my Beyond the Sound series.

Want the full story behind Pink Floyd and the British scene? The books map every era →

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