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The Directors of CCA Galleries are sad to inform you of the death of Storm Thorgerson (1944-2013), described by novelist Douglas Adams as ‘the best album designer in the world’.

The imagination and invention of Thorgerson’s work was legendary and his passing leaves a giant void in British art and design. His hugely successful career spanned five decades, and though he most famously worked with Pink Floyd, he also designed album covers for Ian Dury & the Blockheads, Led Zeppelin, The Cranberries, Muse, Black Sabbath, 10cc and Genesis to name a few.

Thorgerson’s style is immediately recognisable; he disdained the over-use of technology, preferring to keep his images as ‘real’ as possible by using straightforward photography. His visions were surreal and thought provoking.

‘I want our productions to tell a story. My goal is to invest a picture with ambiguity. To make people curious. To make them want to look again. I like photography because it is a reality medium, unlike drawing, which is unreal. I like to mess with reality…to bend reality. Some of my works beg the question of is it real or not?’

After an MA in Film and Television at the Royal College of Art, Thorgerson set up a design partnership, Hipgnosis, with flat-mate Aubrey Powell. Childhood connections with Pink Floyd led to Hipgnosis being commissioned to design the cover for the band’s second LP, A Saucerful of Secrets, in 1968. The originality and success of this work led to commissions from other bands, and the rest is history.

On his approach to creating album cover art Thorgerson said; ‘I listen to the music, read the lyrics, speak to the musicians as much as possible. I see myself as a kind of translator, translating an audio event- the music- into a visual event- the cover. I like to explore ambiguity and contradiction; to be upsetting, but gently so. I use real elements in unreal ways.’

Thorgerson’s 1973 design for Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon album genuinely merits that overused term ‘iconic’. It is considered by many in the music and design worlds to be the best album artwork of all time. The album itself is one of the best-selling albums worldwide. Other particularly memorable works include a giant inflatable pig floating over Battersea power station for the cover of Animals (1977), a burning businessman in a studio lot for 1975’s Wish You Were Here cover, and the endlessly repeating Ummagumma image of 1969.

Later in his career Thorgerson expanded into directing music videos, adverts and documentaries and, in 1987, after the Hipgnosis partnership came to and end, he founded Storm Studios. Following his death, Pink Floyd have described him as ‘a graphic genius’; but let’s leave the last word to Storm,

‘People pay me for my thoughts and my dreams. I think in that sense I'm very fortunate.’