Peter Saville Factory Records

Peter Saville Factory Records

Peter Saville is the British graphic designer who created the visual identity of Factory Records, the Manchester independent label founded by Tony Wilson and Alan Erasmus in 1978. His album covers for Joy Division, New Order, and other Factory artists established a visual language that defined post-punk aesthetics and continues to be one of the most referenced bodies of work in music graphic design.

Factory Records and Tony Wilson

Factory Records was co-founded by Tony Wilson (1950-2007), Granada TV presenter and cultural impresario, with Alan Erasmus in Manchester in 1978. Wilson met Peter Saville, then a student at Manchester Polytechnic, at the Rafters club night and invited him to design the first Factory Records promotional poster that same year. Saville became the label's in-house designer, eventually contributing art direction that rivaled and often exceeded the music itself in cultural significance. Factory famously assigned catalogue numbers to everything - FAC 1 was the first poster, FAC 10 was Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures, FAC 51 was the Hacienda nightclub.

Joy Division: Unknown Pleasures (1979)

FAC 10, Joy Division's debut album Unknown Pleasures, used an image sourced by Saville from the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Astronomy: a radio pulsar signal (CP 1919) represented as stacked waveform lines. The image, printed white on black with the band name and title absent from the front cover entirely, became one of the most iconic album covers ever made. Saville set no type on the front face - the cover relied entirely on the power of the scientific image.

New Order: Power Corruption and Lies (1983)

For New Order's Power Corruption and Lies (1983), Saville used a reproduction of a Henri Fantin-Latour floral painting from the National Gallery, with no band name or title on the front. Color information was encoded in a color bar system on the back (a bar chart of the color wheel indicating letter positions in the album title). The decision to remove band identification from album covers became Saville's signature gesture and Factory's recurring formal idea.

Design Influences and Methods

Saville synthesized Swiss International Style typography (Helvetica, Univers, and later the epistemic typefaces of 1970s European graphic design), found imagery from scientific and art historical sources, and a rigorous concept-driven methodology. His later work for New Order - 'Blue Monday' (12" sleeve with die-cut holes, FAC 73, 1983) and 'Technique' (1989) - and for other clients including Roxy Music and numerous fashion brands extended this language into new registers.