kingy graphic design history: Peter Saville by Oriel

Born in Manchester (1955), Saville studied graphics at the local Polytechnic, and is best known for his work in the late 70s with Factory Records as an album cover designer.

His first commercial project (1978), was a poster to launch The Factory club nights, for which he used the industrial warning sign from College. The black and yellow warning stripes then became an ongoing interest for other projects, combining with the striped camouflage of battle ships, and so becoming one of his early signature designs.

The Factory then became a record label (1979), producing some of the bands that played there, and Saville became the art director.

He was given the perfect freedom of designing subjects of personal interest within personal timeframes, has given Peter's music record covers an ability to make a statement of the moment. Despite his loose design briefs, his interest in the early modern typographers inspired elegance and order, rather than the anarchic style of punk graphics.

Unknown Pleasures by Joy Division, minimalist album design depicting the radio pulses of a dying star, (image found in an old Astrology book).

By the mid 1980s he was sought after by mainstream acts such as Wham! and Peter Gabriel, but felt constrained and sought other avenues that gave him greater artisitc liberation, finding inspiration in the last great period of modernism, the 1950s and 60s.

A move into the fashion industry through catalogues of a Japanese designer equally disillusioned with fashion, (Yohji Yamamoto), reflected the uncertainty of global recession.

He has since worked with big name fashion designers, such as John Galliano at Christian Dior, Selfridges, Givenchy and Stella McCartney for their ad campaigns.

His personal art projects are now his main interest, especially recycling his own work alongside that of others.