A weekly look down into the mortal coil of music industry design.

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Artist: Pink Floyd
Release: The Dark Side of the Moon
Label: Capitol
Designer: Hipgnosis (and a bunch of other people)
Release Date: March 13, 1973

If there’s ever an album cover in the history of design that demands instant recognition, this is probably the one. For a good while, I personally thought this prism and the refracted light image was just a depiction taken from a scientific textbook, but as far as I can tell, it’s original and most likely the first representation of the phenomenon. Art, meet science.

From the wikipedia entry of the design:

The album was also the first Pink Floyd album to have picture labels on the record where it depicted a blue prism with black background and the credits written either in grey lettering (European issues) or white lettering (US and Canadian issues). In 1991, the refracting prism album cover was #35 on Rolling Stone’s 100 greatest album covers of all time list.[15] In 2003, VH1 named Dark Side’s cover the 4th Greatest Album Cover of All Time on their 50 Greatest Album Covers of All Time special.

With all of the rereleases and remixes and DVD and all of that, there have been variations on this design. I included above the most original one I could find, although I’m not sure if the solid prism version is the first one. As I said before, a remastered version of this release features a disgusting blemish in the top right that makes me cringe and sweat whenever I see it. I have half a mind to find out where that decision originated and take some sort of corrective action.

Intentional or not, it’s interesting to note that spectroscopy is instrumental in determining the nature and state of stars.

Science, meet art.