Pink Floyd Graphic Designer On ‘The Dark Side Of The Moon’ Cover Turning 50

Not only is Pink Floyd’s 1973 progressive rock album, The Dark Side of the Moon, iconic, but so is its simple yet striking cover art: a triangular prism set against a black background with a ray of light refracting through it. Though the band’s name and the record’s title do not appear on the front cover, the design is universally recognizable and synonymous with Pink Floyd—so much so that it has since appeared on apparel, posters, mugs, magnets, beach towels, patches, buttons, a British postage stamp, and even the sides of vehicles. In essence, The Dark Side of the Moon design has become the band’s unofficial visual trademark.

The distinctive cover art was conceived by the British graphic design company Hipgnosis, founded in the late 1960s by Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell, which has long worked on Pink Floyd albums. In the five decades since the release of The Dark Side of the Moon (which is marking its golden anniversary with a new box set on Friday), Powell commented last year on the cover design’s longevity:

“I have no idea what makes that album cover so successful. The Dark Side of the Moon was conceived on an afternoon when Pink Floyd [David Gilmour, Rick Wright, Roger Waters and Nick Mason] asked for something very simple and very graphic instead of one of our surrealist photo designs, which wasn’t our style at all.

“I was reading this magazine–an American magazine actually–about the refraction of light. And Storm standing next to me and he said, ‘I’ve got it. A triangular shape with a prism.’ I could illustrate quite well, so I drew it out on a piece of paper. We rushed up to Abbey Road Studios and said [to the band], ‘How about that?’ And they all went, ‘Yeah, that’s us! That’s Pink Floyd.’”

In the liner notes to the 2011 Immersion edition of The Dark Side of the Moon, Thorgerson (who died in 2013) said the idea of the prism came from three things: “namely a desire to gesture a reference to Floyd’s light show which had not been touched upon hitherto; a previous piece of work for a record label design–Clear Light, or was it Mooncrest?–and Rick Wright, who said, ‘Storm, let’s have a cool graphic, not one of your tatty (figurative) pictures. Not again, but something different.’

“So I reworked Clearlight as a prism based on dimly remembered school text book drawings which tended to be diagrammatic—simple black line and a trifle dull, so I added a black background and colours for the spectrum.” (One of the other proposed ideas for the cover was a photographic interpretation of the Silver Surfer from Marvel Comics, per Thorgerson).

With lyrics by Waters, The Dark Side of the Moon touches on the fragility of the human condition such as mental health, and society’s ills like war and greed. “I think the triangle, which is a symbol of thought and ambition, was very much a subject of Roger’s lyrics,” Thorgerson said in 2011, as quoted in Rolling Stone. “So the triangle was a very a useful – as we know, obviously – was a very useful icon to deploy and making it into the prism – you know, the prism belonged to the Floyd.”

Waters also played a role in the album’s packaging, particularly the heartbeat graphic (the sound of a beating heart can bookend the record). “At first, it was just a square – and then the record company told us they’d pay for a gatefold,” he said in John Harris’ 2006 book The Dark Side of the Moon: The Making of the Pink Floyd Masterpiece, “so I said, ‘Why don’t we run the colors through the middle with the image of a heartbeat across it?’ And that was it.”

Gilmour didn’t know why Hipgnosis’ design for the album cover worked, as he explained also in Harris’ book: “When Storm showed us all the ideas, with that one, there was no doubt: That is it. It’s a brilliant cover. One can look at it after that first moment of brilliance and think, ‘Well, it’s a very commercial idea: it’s very stark and simple; it’ll look great in shop windows.’ It wasn’t a nice picture of four lads bouncing around in the countryside. That fact wasn’t lost on us.”

In addition to the album art, Hipgnosis conceived the overall packaging for The Dark Side of the Moon that would include posters. The Egyptian pyramids came to mind due to the triangular shape of the prism, prompting both Thorgerson and Powell to visit Egypt to photograph the ancient structures. “Numerous pics of pyramids from all angles, colour, infrared and black and white were taken and have been gainfully deployed ever since,” Thorgerson said for the Immersion box set. “As indeed has the Dark Side prism, whose graphic simplicity and natural essence has sustained 35 years of usage to accompany one of the best records ever ever in the whole galaxy, (says the manager).”

Over the years, The Dark Side of the Moon has been reissued for anniversary milestones and their respective covers have been modified to reflect that—although the prism remained the focal point, as in the case of this year’s 50th-anniversary box set (it features a newly remastered version of the original album and The Dark Side of the Moon—Live at Wembley Empire Pool, a 1974 concert recording that makes its vinyl debut). The creation of the album’s original design came during a very productive time for Hipgnosis, which had also worked on covers for other artists like Electric Light Orchestra, Emerson Lake and Palmer, T.Rex, and former Pink Floyd singer/guitarist Syd Barrett.

“Now, you have to ask yourself, it sold 65 million albums,” Powell further explained. “If it had only sold 1,000, would it still be iconic? I don’t know. In the same year we did The Dark Side of the Moon, we were working for Paul McCartney, we were working for Bad Company, we did Houses the Holy for Led Zeppelin. The studio was rammed with work and it was an exciting period of time. I didn’t have time to think about whether [Dark Side] was any good at all. Everyone who’s happy about it. It was a big success. I had no idea that 50 years later that it would still be this singular image that would be as popular, if not more than ever.”

Powell, whose most recent design work for Pink Floyd was the 2022 reissue of the Animals album, has witnessed The Dark Side of the Moon’s cover art’s ubiquity first-hand. “I can’t walk down a street without seeing a kid wearing it, and that’s pretty interesting,” he said. “You walk down Oxford Street in London and you’ll see 20 Dark Side of the Moons or variations of that in the space of half an hour. It’s quite bizarre. I mean, if I had a dollar for every time I saw one of those, I’d be a very rich man. (laughs)

“It is interesting,” he continues, “the album sold well and it caught, I think, the imagination of people by association with the cover. I’m very, very, very privileged to have that happen. I think Storm and I were always grateful that that happened, because Hipgnosis’ career after that accelerated considerably. We were suddenly the flavor of the month in the rock and roll world. Which is great.”