Peter Saville

Peter Saville was born in Manchester in 1955 and trained at Manchester Polytechnic. While still a student he met the television presenter Tony Wilson and the musician Alan Erasmus, and in 1978 the three of them co-founded Factory Records. Saville’s first Factory work was the poster for the label’s opening night at the Russell Club — FAC 1, numbered as a catalogue item, a running gag Factory would maintain for every object it ever produced.

Over the next fourteen years Saville art-directed Factory in parallel with his own studio. The Joy Division and New Order sleeves are the work for which he is best known internationally, but the Factory output covered hundreds of records, posters, flyers and ephemera. He also worked as art director of the lifestyle magazine Arena from 1985 to 1988.

After Factory’s collapse in 1992 he moved to London and continued as an independent consultant. Subsequent commissions included work for Yohji Yamamoto, Christian Dior, Stella McCartney, Givenchy, Raf Simons and Burberry, and the long-running creative direction of the City of Manchester from 2004. He was appointed CBE in 2014.

Saville’s working method is appropriation. Pull an image from design history — a Fantin-Latour painting, a Bauhaus colour wheel, a pulsar radio-frequency chart, an industrial code sheet — and let its existing cultural weight carry most of the meaning. The designer’s job is the choice, the context and the typography, not the making of a new image.

That was, in 1979, a confrontational position. The dominant assumption in post-punk record sleeve design was that the designer’s role was to illustrate the band. Saville’s argument was that the sleeve was an exhibition caption for the record, and that its visual authority came from the library of existing visual culture it could quote.

Typographically the discipline is tight. Garamond, Futura, Helvetica set small; numbers at the foot of the cover; back-of-sleeve credits more extensive than most books. The legibility of a Saville sleeve at arm’s length is low by design; the sleeve is meant to reward the reader who picks it up.