Tribute to an Iconic Designer

Original Album

Storm Thorgerson, graphic designer and childhood friend of the legendary rock band 'Pink Floyd' sadly passed away this week.
Thorgerson was best known for his iconic design of Pink Floyd's music album cover 'The Dark Side of The Moon'. This simple graphic has over the last four decades come to symbolise Pink Floyd and their music genre. As of 2012 the album has sold approximately 50 million copies worldwide and according to the Pop History Dig the album was featured in the top 200 for 741 consecutive weeks  from March 1973 to April 1988.   

Anniversary Album

Storm Thorgerson, was not reponsible for  discovering the colour prism but he can be celebrated for the wide appreciation of Sir Issac Newton's discovery of the refraction of light through a prism. As a tribute to Thorgenson’s lifetime of work in graphic design for Pink Floyd let us look at the colour prism in more detail.

How Is it That We See Colour ?

It was in the 1600's that Newton pioneered experiments with sunlight in his laboratory and discovered that it is light that allows us to see colour. By directing sunlight into a prism he observed that the ray of light was bent – refracted, resulting in an the rainbow of colours each with different wavelengths. The most prominent colours appearing in order from the longest wavelength to the shortest; red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet.The spectrum appears continuous with no boundaries between the colours as we see in Thorgenson's graphic.

Light being broken down into colours

When we see the colour of an object it is because the light has been either absorbed or reflected depending on the wavelength of the visible light. White light is the total of all wavelengths of visible light. When light strikes a surface some wavelengths are absorbed and others are reflected or bounced back by the pigment or colouring  agent giving the surface of objects their colour. 

So, if we see red then only red wavelengths have been reflected off the surface and the remaining wavelengths are absorbed. When all wavelengths are absorbed the resulting colour is white.  Therefore our colour perception is the result of the light source interacting with the objects we are looking at. When there is no light hence an absence of colour we see black. Newton added the visible light spectrum to a circular shape so that artists could see the complementary colours to red, blue and yellow.
Johannes Itten, Albert H Munsell and Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe continued to develop and experiment with colour and vision, their work forming the basis of our understanding of colour theory today.

It is 40 years since Thorgenson designed the 'Dark Side of the Moon' album cover and we thank him for heightening awareness of the colour spectrum in popular culture.  
Join me in my next post on "Colour Trends and Forecasting"    Cheers Diyu                                                                                  

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(With the exception of the  Images)

© The Avatar image is copyright to Ramneek Narang All Rights Reserved 2013

Many thanks to Ramneek Narang, Pink Floyd Official Site  and Web Exhibits for the images on this post.