Boston

Paula Scher thought the concept was "idiotic." As art director at CBS Records in 1976, she was tasked with creating a cover for the new band Boston after numerous designs had been rejected, including literal interpretations using lettuce and cream pie imagery.

Tom Scholz, the band's MIT-educated founder and product engineer at Polaroid, insisted on incorporating a guitar into the design. Scher found this cliché and couldn't bring herself to do it literally. Their compromise birthed one of rock's most enduring images.

Scher morphed upside-down guitars into a fleet of alien-style spacecrafts. The sound holes became the source of fiery blue flames, while the guitar necks served as the spaceships' tail sections. The intended imagery depicted Earth exploding while the guitar-spaceships escaped into orbit.

Originally, there were supposed to be multiple guitar-city-spaceships labeled London, Paris, and Rome, with Boston as the largest escaping front and center. Eventually they removed the other city names to avoid confusion and kept only Boston.

Illustrator Roger Huyssen brought Scher's concept to life. His career included creating close to a hundred album covers, from Duke Ellington and James Brown to this classic iconic guitar spaceship. He graduated from UC Santa Barbara with an economics degree before pursuing graduate work at Art Center College of Design.

Typographer Gerard Huerta created the distinctive lettering that appears on the spaceship's body. Working as a staff member at CBS Records, Huerta specialized in custom letterforms for album covers. He designed the lettering to have a "tech-like" feel that complemented Scholz's engineering background.

The album was released on August 25, 1976, through Epic Records, a division of CBS. It became the fastest-selling debut album for any American group, earning gold certification in three weeks and platinum in three months. By January 1977, it had sold 2 million copies.

The cover sparked no major controversies, but it did become a lightning rod for design criticism. Scher has been mystified by its continued cultural resonance, telling The Atlantic in 2015: "It was, and still is, in my opinion, a mediocre piece of work."

The visual composition features a dark space scene with stars and planets. The main spaceship displays a groovy 1970s orange and dark blue color scheme with light blue booster flames. Four or five smaller spaceships appear to be fleeing the exploding planet below.

The typography integrates seamlessly with the futuristic spaceship illustration. Huerta's lettering creates a soaring visual motif that complements the band's arena-rock sound. The city skyline visible in the spaceship's "window" presumably represents Boston.

The cover influenced decades of design, from 3-D color blends to stylistic elements in software like Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop. Scher noted in her book "Make it Bigger" that computer programs seemed designed to enable anyone to create their own Boston cover.

The guitar-spaceship became Boston's permanent logo, appearing on every subsequent album with a continuing storyline. It has been used as a giant stage prop during concert tours, complete with lights and additional set pieces.

One fascinating detail most fans never noticed: those spaceships are actually guitars turned upside down, with the sound hole serving as the flame source and the headstock as the tail section.