Po on Dark Side of the Moon

Textbook prism illustration

From the documentary Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis), Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell and George Hardie on the cover art for Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon:

Aubrey Powell: One day, I was looking through this physics magazine about light and about refraction of light. And Storm [Thorgerson] was hovering over me. He looked at me and he said, ‘I’ve got it, Po.’ I said, ‘What? What is it?’ And he said, ‘It’s a prism.’

George Hardie: The reason that it looks like that is that I’ve got to get it from a school exercise book. Although there are plenty of really quite good photographs of prisms with rainbows in them, they don’t have that iconic look.

(related: Peter Hook on Unknown Pleasures)