Hipgnosis

Hipgnosis were an English art design group, based in London, that specialised in creating album cover artwork for rock musicians and bands.

[1] Their commissions included work for Pink Floyd, Def Leppard, T. Rex, the Pretty Things, Black Sabbath, Wishbone Ash, UFO, 10cc, Bad Company, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Scorpions, the Nice, Paul McCartney & Wings, the Alan Parsons Project, Yes, Genesis, Peter Gabriel, Electric Light Orchestra, Rainbow, Styx and Al Stewart.

Thorgerson said they liked the word, not only for punning on "hypnosis", but for possessing "a nice sense of contradiction, of an impossible co-existence, from Hip = new, cool, and groovy, and gnosis, relating to ancient learning.

After that, the firm became highly sought-after, and did many covers for high-profile bands and artists such as Led Zeppelin, Genesis, UFO, Black Sabbath, Peter Gabriel, the Alan Parsons Project, and Yes.

In particular, Thorgerson and Powell's surreal, elaborately manipulated photos (utilizing darkroom tricks, multiple exposures, airbrush retouching, and mechanical cut-and-paste techniques) were a film-based forerunner of what would, much later, be called photoshopping.

Such humour once angered Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin, when Hipgnosis created a visual pun based on "(tennis) racquet"/"(noise) racket" for the 1973 album Houses of the Holy.

One of the extras created by Hipgnosis was the specially printed inner sleeve for Led Zeppelin's In Through the Out Door (1979) LP, which was black and white but turned to colour when dampened with water (tying in with the main cover's photographic theme).