Peter Saville

Peter Saville

Peter Saville CBE (* 1955 ) is a graphic designer from Manchester , best known for his album covers for Joy Division , OMD , New Order and other bands on the Factory Records label .

His works - for example the legendary cover of the New Order single Blue Monday in the form of an 8 "floppy disk or the cover for the album Unknown Pleasures by Joy Division - are characterized by a reduced, minimalist style. A frequent stylistic device of Saville is omission the name of the artist and / or the album title, sometimes he works with coding .

Career

Saville studied graphic design from 1975 to 1978 at the Polytechnic University of Manchester . His main influences at this time were the book Pioneers of Modern Typography by Herbert Spencer and Die Neue Typographie by Jan Tschichold, as well as the work of his friend Malcolm Garrett for the punk band Buzzcocks .

Saville came into contact with the music scene after he met the television journalist Tony Wilson at a concert by Patti Smith in 1978 and shortly thereafter was commissioned to design the first poster (Fac 1) for Factory Records. After graduating in July 1978, he founded the music label Factory Records with Wilson, Rob Gretton and Alan Erasmus, among others . Together with the music producer Martin Hannett , Saville became his creative team and responsible for the acoustically and optically unmistakable image of the label's publications.

In 1979, Saville moved to London where he became Art Director of Din Disc , a division of the Virgin Group . In this role he designed many pioneering covers for a number of artists from Roxy Music to OMD . He later founded his company Peter Saville Associates, with which he worked for clients such as CNN , Adobe Inc. , Givenchy and Stella McCartney in addition to his work in the music field .

literature

• Emily King, Peter York: Designed by Peter Saville . Frieze, 2003, ISBN 0-9527414-2-3 . (English)
• Steven Gontarski, Thomas Grunfeld, Sarah Morris: Peter Saville - Estate . JRP Editions, 2007, ISBN 978-3-905701-66-1 . (English)
• Thomas Demand, Peter Saville, Hedi Slimane, Hans Ullrich Obrist: Art, Fashion and Work for Hire: Thomas Demand, Peter Saville, Hedi Slimane, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Christina Bechtler in Conversation (Art & Architecture in Discussion) . Springer-Verlag, 2008, ISBN 978-3-211-75787-1 .

Web links

• Video interview on I love Design
• several thematic video interviews on VIMEO (English)