Factory Records
A complete archive of the covers and materials printed by the seminal Manchester
label Factory Records. In a design sense, Factory's covers were tremendously
influential, especially the work of Factory co-founder Peter Saville for Joy Division,
New Order, and others. This project came into Chronicle from British publisher
Thames & Hudson as a buy-in, which meant we were buying rights to publish their book
in the United States. With buy-ins we always redo the cover, and in this case
we only had about a week to come up with our design. Or we could use the same
design as Thames & Hudson, seen below:
My initial ideas sought to replicate the spirit of the classic Factory albums, with
their elegant and simple typography and almost corporate feel. The one that
seemed to be working best was based on shapes representing the range of formats
Factory released music on -- EP, LP, CD and tape -- each at actual size. The
book was being printed as paperback and hardcover, so I proposed red for one and blue
for the other, which later morphed into blue for the front and red for the back,
with the spine merging into purple.
After showing my ideas to Chronicle's cover board, which included a couple of Factory
devotes, it became clear that what they wanted from the cover was recognition,
rather than interpretation. While it was a dissapointing to be so literal with this project,
I could see the logic behind using an iconic image. Ultimately we settled on what is
probably the most mythic Saville cover -- New Order's Power, Corruption and Lies.
I set the type as simply as possible and sent it off to Thames & Hudson for approval
like this:
After about two weeks in which we heard nothing and I got increasingly worried, we
received this version of the cover along with excellent news -- not only had Peter
Saville himself approved the cover, but he had tweaked the cover type, finished the
jacket wrap, and asked that Thames & Hudson change theirs to match. So, not mine,
but not bad. I dropped our copy into the layout, gave Saville the design credit, and
sent it off to the printer.
