Description

Richard Wright asked Hipgnosis for something "simple and bold", a design that was "smarter, neater, more classy", and he compared his ideal to the box of a Black Magic chocolate assortment. Storm Thorgerson answered with a diagram he had found in a 1963 physics textbook: a beam of white light entering a prism and leaving it as a spectrum. George Hardie, a Hipgnosis associate, drew the final artwork. When Hipgnosis showed the band seven designs, all four pointed at the prism. "There were no arguments," Roger Waters said.

The image did several jobs at once. It referenced the light shows of Pink Floyd's concerts, the clarity Wright had asked for and the album's themes of pressure and madness, all without a word of text on the front. The design also carries a small inaccuracy that fans love to point out: the spectrum has six colours, not seven, because indigo is missing.

The package was built to unfold. At Waters's suggestion the spectrum continues across the gatefold, where it becomes the line of a heartbeat, echoing the sound that opens and closes the record. Thorgerson's back cover adds a second, inverted prism that gathers the colours back into white light, so shops could line sleeves up in an endless chain. Inside were two posters, one an infrared photograph of the pyramids at Giza by Aubrey Powell and Thorgerson, plus two pyramid stickers, and for the first time Pink Floyd printed their lyrics on a sleeve.

Credit

Design by Storm Thorgerson and Hipgnosis; artwork by George Hardie