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The Owls by Carlo Farneti for a 1935 edition of Les Fleurs du Mal. Via Beautiful Century although the scans probably came originally from 50 Watts. • “…a project that seemed under a curse comprising greed, peculiar French copyright laws, jealousies and grudges, bad judgment, complicated ownership disagreements, a messy estate, and a list of […]

Work-related research this week had me wondering who it was that first thought of turning Battersea Power Station into a table. For the past few days I’ve been looking at a lot of the illustration work that George Hardie produced for the Hipgnosis album covers in the 70s and 80s; I’ll explain why in due […]

A post for Record Store Day, and a slight return to the work of Hipgnosis and the late Storm Thorgerson. One of the many things which impressed about Hipgnosis album designs was the way they gradually came to approach each album as a distinct package for which every component deserved special attention. The very early […]

Wish You Were Here (outer and inner sleeve, 1975) by Pink Floyd. Whenever people ask questions about your work at some point the subject of influences always turns up. Influences for me are usually few, they’re those things which skew your perception to such a degree—or which enlarge the range of possibilities—that they make you […]

Here in Britain there’s no Thanksgiving so turkey as a seasonal meal is a Christmas dish. Turkey also has another meaning which the OED can supply: 6.6 U.S. slang. a.6.a An inferior or unsuccessful cinematographic or theatrical production, a flop; hence, anything disappointing or of little value. This post concerns the latter—turkeys for the turkey […]

A photograph of the control room of Battersea Power Station, London, by Michael Collins, one of a series which will shortly be on display at the Royal Institute of British Architects. The images show Battersea Power Station as what Collins describes as a “twentieth century ruined castle” – a building that was built to last, […]