Cuttings

FOR THE LOOK OF IT https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2003/may/10/artsfeatures.art First published on Sat 10 May 2003 11.29 BST His album covers for Joy Division and Roxy Music defined the style of a generation, and his influence on today's designers is second to none. But has Peter Saville spent a little too much time perfecting his other great obsession: himself? Caroline Roux meets the design gurus' guru It's a grey and rainy day in Barcelona, but in one of the city's conference centres a little glamour is going on. On the stage of a packed auditorium, a jaded but suave Englishman in black sweater and white Helmut Lang jeans is holding forth, sighing deeply and dragging on a fag between each slide. Images of iconic record covers and fashion campaigns fill the huge screen. The audience hangs on every word as the speaker provides more than an hour's entertain...

The Peter Saville Show  23 May to 14 September 2003 Ever since his first work for the fledgeling Factory Records in the late 1970s, PETER SAVILLE has been a pivotal figure in graphic design and style culture. In fashion and art projects as well as in music, his work combines an unerring elegance with a remarkable ability to identify images that epitomise the moment. When the fly posters for Suede's new single Film Star were pasted on walls across London in 1997, the languid male sprawled elegantly on the back seat of a Lincoln limousine was instantly recognisable to any graphic design enthusiasts who happened to stroll past. It was Peter Saville, the graphic designer, who had not only art directed the cover of Film Star and the rest of Suede's Coming Up album, but had posed for the photograph by Nick Knight. Such a visible manifestation of the designer's signature was exactly what Brett Anderson, Suede's lead...

I visited the Peter Saville Show at the Design Museum on Monday 8 September 2003. It was a fascinating show, which unfortunately my poor quality pictures don't always demonstrate. As a footnote, this was the same period of time when David Blaine was performing his endurance test in a plastic box near Tower Bridge. As I walked past that on the way, I took a picture of that too!

UNDER THE COVERS Every picture tells a story. Especially when it comes to classic album art... Rolling Stones Let It Bleed By the time Robert Brownjohn came to design the anarchic sleeve for Let It Bleed , the American-born graphic designer had already made his mark by working on large-scale commercial projects for the likes of Pepsi, as well as creating the title sequences for James Bond movies, From Russia With Love and Goldfinger . His pop-art sensibilities were brought to bear on the Stones’s 1969 effort, Brownjohn’s sleeve sculpture being based on the initial title of ‘Automatic Charger’ - hence the cover shot suggesting a fully stacked record player - and augmented by the ca...