⭐ Stage Diving… Today we analyze the cover of Dark Side Of The Moon 👀

Released on March 1, 1973 in the United States and on March 24 in the United Kingdom, it became an immediate success, reaching number one on the Billboard 200 chart and marking a before and after in the history of music. 

The album's original design was the work of the British collective Hipgnosis, founded in 1968 by Aubrey Powell and Storm Thorgerson, the latter a Cambridge classmate of Pink Floyd. Hipgnosis's collaboration with the band began with the cover of A Saucerful of Secrets, but it wasn't until the artwork for The Dark Side of the Moon that the artistic collective achieved its greatest acclaim.

The album's gatefold sleeve features a prism on its cover that refracts white light and breaks it down into the colors of the rainbow. The idea for the prism came from a photograph Thorgerson had previously seen. As he explained in a statement collected on Shine On, the compilation box set released in 1992 to mark the band's 25th anniversary: "Roger [Waters] talked about the pressures of touring, the madness, the ambition... and the triangle is a symbol of ambition. Rick [Wright] was looking for something more graphic, less photographic, something more elegant than before. The Floyd's light show was considered very powerful, and the prism seemed like a good way to capture that graphically."

Hipgnosis submitted seven different designs for the cover, but all Pink Floyd members agreed that the prism proposal was by far the best. The prism design represented three key concepts: the spectacular lighting of the band's concerts, the album's profound lyrics, and Richard Wright's explicit desire to create a "simpler, cleaner" cover.

The final artwork was executed by British designer and illustrator George Hardie, a regular contributor to the Hipgnosis collective. In 2001, Storm Thorgerson himself elaborated on the cover's symbolism: "The prism referenced the lighting effects at Pink Floyd concerts. Furthermore, a more physical representation of the triangle was the pyramid, reflecting madness and serving as a symbol of boundless ambition. Pyramids also evoke the cosmos, but also madness," he explained. "All these aspects are found in the album. The light spectrum of the cover extends onto the back of the case and inside the vinyl, to show that all the fragments of the album are interconnected."

Graphic source
+info: darkside40.pinkfloyd.com

And you, do you like the album cover?

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