The Dark Side of the Moon

The design firm Hipgnosis, led by Storm Thorgerson, was given an unusual brief by the band: they wanted something "simple, clinical, and precise" — a stark contrast to the elaborate, psychedelic album art that dominated progressive rock. Keyboardist Richard Wright specifically mentioned wanting a design that was "elegant" and "graphic." Thorgerson was inspired by a photograph of a light beam passing through a prism he'd seen during a briefing at the Royal College of Art.

The prism represents several things simultaneously: the band's elaborate light shows, the album's themes of madness and clarity, and the idea of something pure (white light) being broken into its component parts — much like the album dissects human experience into its emotional components (greed, time, death, madness). The spectrum of light continues from the front cover to the back, where the dispersed colors re-converge into a single beam of white light — but with a twist. The re-converged beam hits another prism on the back, suggesting an infinite, cyclical process.

George Hardie, a young illustrator at Hipgnosis, actually executed the final artwork by hand as a precise technical drawing, not a photograph. The clean lines and black background gave the image a timeless, almost scientific quality.

The original LP gatefold included two posters and a set of stickers. One poster featured a photograph of the Great Pyramids of Giza shot in infrared by Hipgnosis, connecting the prism shape to ancient geometry.

The Dark Side of the Moon remained on the Billboard 200 chart for 937 weeks. The prism image has become arguably the single most recognized and reproduced piece of music-related art in history — appearing on countless t-shirts, posters, tattoos, and parodies. It proved that minimalism could be just as powerful as elaborate artwork, influencing generations of graphic designers.