Peter Saville Album Cover Analysis

With this Essay I intend to look at the Album cover of Unknown Joy. A album made by joy division with the cover being designed by Peter Saville. I plan to look at this image and try to figure out what its meant to mean or represent, seeing If I can think of why it would have been used as an album cover image. Then afterwards I will research and find out in detail what the idea was meant to represent and how far or close my initial thoughts were.

Looking at this image I see that it Is a black and white image with many lines going across in the center of a black box, these lines form a rectangle shape within the middle of the black area. During the middle each of the lines lumps up as if it were making waves or mountains. They are layered behind

When I had first spotted this image from a distance I thought it was going to be some sort of weird deformed barcode with its use of black and white bars, But when you get close to it, it's fairly obvious that it is nothing like that and instead seems to be a ripple through a flat surface. Apart from these jagged lines on black, there is nothing else to the album cover. This is important because it also means there is no text, title or name of the band. Making the album itself seem ambiguous. The way this makes me think about the album is that the band or the music they made specifically for this album is also meant to be ambiguous, using this artwork to sell that idea from the cover. While writing this part of my essay I am also listening to the album from the start to try to understand if the cover art is meant to reflect

However for some reason there was one link about album covers wich had a small section talking about the graphic designs of Peter Saville. Reading through what it has to say I found out that this was actually the debut studio album of Joy Division. Here it claims that ''The cover of the album is as stark and enigmatic as the music itself'', Which is something I was able to pick up on when I listened to the music myself. Peter Saville also worked on many other albums during that time, such as New Order, Roxy Music, Pulp, and several others, However the one he had designed for Joy division remains his most famous one. This website also lead me onto a video where it was an interview with Peter Saville himself. He goes on to explain how within the past 30 years (at the time of the video) he never expected the image to have exploded in popularity like it has done, claiming it to be a ''worldwide cult surrounding Unknown Pleasures''. Talking about the first time he saw someone with the image tattooed in full all the way down their back calling it ''Obsessive Commitment''. Since then it has been used in tattoos commonly as well as clothing, fashion, pottery, shoes, parody artwork and many other