I have chosen to he album cover for Led Zeppelin III which was designed by Richard Drew known by the name Zacron and artist that was good friends with the bands Jimmy Page. The album was released in 1970, 1970 being a big year for peace, love and hippie culture. You can see this influence on the typography of the album cover as it has that big, thick, beautiful bubble text to it that you would see in a lot of hippie influenced art, graffiti, at the hippies’ peaceful protests, on signs and at concerts. Which was a really big part of culture at the time.

The designer and Jimmy Page used to hang out prior to the albums design and they would decorate their guitars with collage and materials for textures and experimental designs all done in in a really relaxed, chill, no pressure environment to the soft sounds of Jimi Hendrix.

So this experimental, relaxed the technique was used by Zacron in the actual design of the album cover with a white background a the beautiful thick type as a base. Zacron used montaging and collage to design the album. All the pictures together making up a very nonsensical image for the cover but when the time was taken to view each image used individually and then together links could be made and it was seen as sort of a story, not to be recognised as something sensical however.

This style was used throughout the album cover, and when you really began to look closer a lot of the images Zacron used could be categorised in to a theme of “flight”. Using all these beautiful images of birds , butterflies, planes, UFOs and of course Zeppelins. It was a surrealist piece and I believe it to be a very iconic album cover and very representative of the age it was made in.