The band's name began as a joke about failure. When the idea of a new supergroup came up, Keith Moon is said to have quipped that it would go over like a lead balloon, and John Entwistle reportedly replied, "a lead zeppelin!" Jimmy Page kept the phrase, spelled it Led so nobody would mispronounce it, and the debut album's cover turned the joke into a picture: the German airship Hindenburg exploding into flames over Lakehurst, New Jersey.

The image is a drawing, made by the young designer George Hardie from Sam Shere's famous photograph of the disaster on 6 May 1937. Hardie cropped the photo and rendered it in ink with a Rapidograph pen, using a dotted mezzotint technique that gives it the grain of an old newspaper print. His first proposal, a sequence of zeppelins drifting through clouds based on a sign from a San Francisco club, was turned down by Page, though it ended up as the logo on the back of the first two albums.

The cover caused trouble with the airship's own family. In February 1970 Eva von Zeppelin, a relative of the airship's inventor Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, threatened legal action over the use of the name, and in Copenhagen the band played under the name the Nobs. Collectors chase a smaller detail: the first British pressings printed the band name and the Atlantic logo in turquoise before switching to orange, and those turquoise sleeves now sell for thousands of pounds. Billboard ranked the cover fifth on its list of the best album covers of all time.

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