Peter Saville

Peter Saville (b. 1955, Manchester) is a British graphic designer who co-founded Factory Records in Manchester in 1978 with Tony Wilson and others, and whose visual work for the label produced some of the most widely recognized album covers in the history of popular music. He studied at Manchester Polytechnic.

His designs for Joy Division — Unknown Pleasures (1979), Closer (1980) — and for New Order — Power, Corruption and Lies (1983), Low-Life (1985), Technique (1989) — developed a visual language that drew on Constructivism, Futurism, Modernist typography, and art historical imagery, applied to the distribution of underground music with a rigorous precision that was unusual in the context of independent record production. These covers entered popular culture far beyond their original context and established a set of references — the cyan circle of Blue Monday (1983), the flower photograph of Power, Corruption and Lies — that continue to be reproduced and cited. Beyond Factory, Saville has worked across fashion — with Raf Simons, Givenchy, Calvin Klein, and Stella McCartney — urban planning (Creative Director of Manchester, 2004–), and cultural institutions. His work was the subject of a major retrospective at the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester.