Who is Storm Thorgerson?
Thorgerson is of Norwegian descent and was born in 1944 in Potters Bar, a small town in Hertfordshire, roughly 13 miles north of Central London.
For his early education, Thorgerson attended Summerhill School and Brunswick Primary, both in Cambridge. He would later go on to attend Cambridgeshire High School for Boys, the same school which Pink Floyd founders Syd Barrett and Roger Waters attended.
After completing high school, Storm Thorgerson went on to study at the University of Leicester, earning a Bachelor of Arts with Honours. Several years later, he enrolled in the Royal College of Art, majoring in Film and Television, where he obtained his Master of Arts.
For much of his early career, Thorgerson worked on smaller, lesser-known projects. In 1967/68, along with his friend, Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell, the two co-founded the album design company Hipgnosis. This was the same year they conceived the album cover for Pink Floyd’s “A Saucerful of Secrets”. Storm, alongside Powell, spearheaded album cover art with album cover images that helped to catapult Pink Floyd’s album and other album artwork into a new era of album graphics for the present day.
Hipgnosis Album Art
During the height of the music and cultural revolution, Thorgerson and his company, Hipgnosis, along with Powell, helped to change the reality medium of classic album covers through their seemingly outlandish and forward-thinking designs for the period.
While the close friends were not necessarily considered to be graphic designers in the capacity we know of them today, their photographs, unlike drawings, have helped change how present-day designers approach their work.
Being ahead of the curve, the team at Hipgnosis designed a handful of album covers for well-known artists and musicians, including Genesis, Catherine Wheel, Led Zeppelin, 10cc, Peter Gabriel and, of course, the most iconic Pink Floyd album cover of all time, “Dark Side of the Moon”.
Throughout the 1970s and into the early 1980s, Thorgerson, along with Hipgnosis, designed some of the most iconic album covers, many of which still carry artistic and social significance nearly five decades later.
Although Thorgerson and Powell would later decide to close the doors to their Hipgnosis design studio in 1982, Storm continued to work as an independent artist in his studio in North London.
Breaching New Frontiers
Following the end of Hipgnosis, Throgerson would later continue to pursue a new creative avenue in the film and television industry. Both Thorgerson and Powell founded Greenback Films, which was operational between 1982 and 1984.
Following this, in the early 1990s, Throgerson launched StormStudios in collaboration with Peter Curzon, who has worked on several feature films, such as Have You Got It Yet? The Story of Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd (released 2023) and Taken by Storm: The Art of Storm Thorgerson and Hipgnosis (released 2011).
Thorgerson took up the responsibility of photography, design and illustration at StormStudios. In addition to this, he was in charge of creative retouching and print media for the company.
Besides Thorgerson and Powell, along with their team of freelancers working on album cover designs and artwork, the artists work on other projects, including the publication of several books focused on Thorgerson’s artwork.
In 1989 the team published the first book, titled Classic Album Cover of the 60s. Throughout the late 1990s and much of the 2000s, Thorgerson’s literary works appeared in other publications, and in 2013, a final book, The Gathering Storm, A Quartet in Several Parts, was published posthumously.
Thorgerson passed away on April 18, 2013, leaving behind a lifetime of cultural and artistic influence and helping pave the way for the early development of graphic design in post-war Britain.
