Given my life's recent theme of introductions - to a new school, a new semester, a new crop of classmates, and a new medium - I find it fitting to introduce an artist and designer that has opened my eyes to new things many times over. Traditionally, album covers have served as not only the visual interpretation of the meaning or mood behind the music and artists they correspond to, but they are a symbolic introduction to the music itself. No one does this better than Storm Thorgerson, a British designer of several iconic rock album covers.
The piece shown above, the album cover for Pink Floyd's final studio album The Division Bell, is quintessential Storm Thorgerson. It's clear looking at the cover, that the theme is one of opposition, but it is the design of the cover that brings it to life. Through his surreal juxtaposition of objects in a photograph, he creates a message and sets the tone for the meaning of the album, thus introducing the music to us through art.
Thorgerson's sense of placing objects in foreign places is what I find fascinating, and it is a style that I personally would like to replicate and expand in my own work, whether it is through digital photography or graphic design.
While rock groups like Pink Floyd and the Mars Volta may not be your cup of tea, Thorgerson's use of surrealism and juxtaposition in their album covers is a mastery that my fellow Design students surely can appreciate as his techniques create messages that are not only addressed to the musically inclined, but to us as artists.
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