Telluride Premieres ‘Squaring the Circle,’ Doc On Hipgnosis Design Firm That Created Many Of Rock’s Greatest Album Covers

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It may be the most famous album cover ever created.The background – black. In the foreground, a shaft of white light pierces a triangular prism and exits separating into brilliant bands of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet.The artwork, as any true rock fan can instantly tell you, is for the 1973 Pink Floyd album Dark Side of the Moon.

We know the band, we know the record, but who designed that album cover? It came out of the brilliant British design firm Hipgnosis, the subject of the new documentary Squaring the Circle (the story of hipgnosis).

Anton Corbijn directed the film, which made its world premiere over the Labor Day Weekend at the Telluride Film Festival.“The beauty of white on black [background], with colors, it’s just the simplicity,” Corbijn says of that prismatic design. “I think it’s a beautiful album sleeve, and I think it probably defines the album sleeve.”If Hipgnosis had created just that single unforgettable album cover it would be worth noting.

But the outfit founded by Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey “Po” Powell designed a slew of iconic covers in the 1970s and ‘80s for some of the most significant artists in music history, including Led Zeppelin, Paul McCartney and Wings, T-Rex, 10cc, Peter Gabriel, Genesis, AC/DC, Black Sabbath, Yes, the aforementioned Pink Floyd and others.Unlike the stark graphic design for Dark Side of the Moon, many of Hipgnosis’s best known covers leveraged photographic images.