Peter Saville
Peter Saville is perhaps the most well-known graphic designer of his generation. He was part of a triumvirate of designers that emerged in the early eighties that had roots within the post-punk music scene: Malcolm Garrett with the Buzzcocks, Magazine and Duran Duran; Neville Brody with Cabaret Voltaire and Fetish Records; and Peter Saville with Factory Records. Saville and Garrett both studied at Manchester Polytechnic, whilst there, Saville was inspired by the work of typographer Jan Tschichold. According to Saville “Malcolm had a copy of Herbert Spencer’s Pioneers of Modern Typography. The one chapter that he hadn’t reinterpreted in his own work was the cool, disciplined ‘New Typography’ of Tschichold and its subtlety appealed to me. I found a paralled in it for the new wave that was evolving out of punk.”
Fac 1 The Factory Club No 1 1978
Saville first met Tony Wilson at a Patti Smith concert in 1978. This meeting resulted in Wilson commissioning the first Factory poster, Fac 1. Having long admired the ‘found’ motorway sign on the cover of Kraftwerk’s Autobahn, the first album he bought for himself, Saville based the Factory poster on a found object of his own – an industrial warning sign he had stolen from a door at Manchester Polytechnic. Saville became a partner of Factory Records along with Wilson, Rob Gretton and Alan Erasmus. As a co-founder of the label, he was given an unusual, if not unprecedented level of freedom to design whatever he wanted, just as the bands were with their music: free from the constraints of budgets and deadlines which were routinely imposed on designers elsewhere. Saville treated his artwork for Factory acts such as Joy Division and Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark as form of self-expression to articulate whatever happened to obsess or interest him at the time.
Fac 223 New Order Fine Time 1989
In the early 1980s, Saville turned to classical art historical references, juxtaposing them with complex coding systems. For the cover of New Order’s 1983 album Power Corruption And Lies, Fact 75, he combined a nineteenth century Fantin-Latour flower painting with a coded colour alphabet. Having seen a floppy disk for the first time, he conceived the sleeve of Blue Monday, Fac 73, as a replica. Notoriously, Factory had to pay more to print the record’s sleeve than it could sell the single for.
Fac 223R New Order Fine Time Remix 1989
Time and again, Saville’s work has intuitively touched a nerve: the headstone-like rusted metal sheet for Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart, Fac 23, and the funereal image used on Closer, Fact 25, were both designed before the tragedy of Ian Curtis’s suicide. Saville’s experimental collaborations with photographer Trevor Key using the Diachromatic photographic silk-screening process on New Order’s 1989 album Technique, Fact 275, and the singles Fine Time, Fac 223, and Round & Round, Fac 263, captured the spirit of the drug-fuelled club nights of 1988, the hey-day of acid house, which had influenced these tracks, prompting Saville to reflect that this was “the first time that a New Order cover reflected something that was actually going on in youth culture.”
Fac 223/7 New Order Fine Time 1989
