OK Computer

Stanley Donwood and Thom Yorke created the artwork collaboratively during the album's recording sessions at St Catherine's Court, a 15th-century manor house near Bath owned by actress Jane Seymour. The two worked in a side room, creating visual art alongside the music in what Donwood has described as a parallel creative process. They used a combination of early Macintosh computers, photocopiers, scraperboard, and physical cut-and-paste collage techniques.

The cover image is a layered, disorienting collage of blurred highway imagery, distorted text fragments, and abstract shapes. Specific elements include aerial views of road systems, fragments of corporate language, and shapes that suggest both organic and mechanical forms. The overall effect is of information overload — a visual representation of anxiety about technology, globalization, and the increasing speed of modern life.

Donwood has described the artwork as being about "the noise of modern life" and the feeling of being overwhelmed by information. The text fragments scattered throughout the packaging include phrases like "lost child" and references to transportation systems. The color palette is dominated by institutional grays, clinical whites, and washed-out blues — the colors of airports, highways, and corporate offices.

The interior artwork and booklet expand on these themes with additional collaged imagery, handwritten text, and what appear to be bureaucratic diagrams. The overall package was designed to feel like a document from a slightly dystopian near-future — prescient given that the album's themes of digital alienation, surveillance anxiety, and corporate dehumanization proved remarkably predictive of 21st-century concerns.

Donwood continued to create all of Radiohead's visual art for subsequent albums, developing one of the most important artist-band collaborations in modern music. His work with the band has been exhibited in galleries including the Uffizi in Florence.

The artwork helped establish the album as a complete artistic statement — not just music, but a multimedia experience. Donwood's visual language for Radiohead influenced a generation of album art and graphic design, particularly in the indie and alternative rock worlds. The cover's deliberately unsettling, anti-commercial aesthetic stood in stark contrast to the glossy imagery of late-1990s Britpop and set a new standard for album art as fine art.