As the graphic designer for the legendary Factory label, Peter Saville revolutionized the look and feel of music packaging, transforming the humble cardboard LP sleeves of pop's past into postmodernist objects d'art. Cryptic and enigmatic yet lush and often beautiful, Saville's groundbreaking work for bands like Joy Division, New Order, Pulp and Suede perfectly complemented the music contained therein, appropriating styles and sensibilities from across the artistic spectrum to convey moods and messages unique to their musical time and place. Saville was born in Manchester, England in 1955, studying graphic design at Manchester Polytechnic from 1975 to 1978. Intrigued by the city's emerging punk community, Saville befriended Buzzcocks manager Richard Boon, from whom he heard that local television presenter Tony Wilson, host of the Granada music program So It Goes, was opening his own club, the Factory. Saville set about designing a poster to advertise the Factory's opening night, scheduled for May 19, 1978; although the poster was completed too late to promote the club's debut, he nevertheless signed on as a founding partner in Wilson's fledgling Factory Records label. The imprint's first release, the double-EP A Factory Sampler, originally bore the catalogue number FAC 1, but Saville insisted to Wilson that his concert poster was actually the label's first release, making the EP FAC 2. From that point forward, all Factory merchandise--LPs, posters, badges, videos, even Christmas cards--was assigned its own unique catalogue code. At Factory's outset, one of Saville's central influences was Herbert Spencer's book Pioneers of Modern Typography, in particular the chapter on the new typography of Tschichold. Sensing in Tschichold's work a subtlety and discipline that mirrored the remote worldview of the Manchester music scene, Saville developed a unique style rooted in appropriation, referencing and revitalizing images and aesthetics from throughout art history in a bold, thoroughly postmodernist context. “Everything for Factory is designed instead of decorated," Saville once said; far removed from the chaotic, collage-like sleeves of punks like the Sex Pistols and the Clash, Factory releases were indeed carefully composed, albeit no less confrontational--one of the company's most famous and notorious early LP jackets, for the 1980 album The Return of the Durutti Column, drew inspiration from the Situationist author Guy-Ernest Debord, who'd published books bound in sandpaper; consequently, the album came in a heavy sandpaper sleeve designed to damage other records when placed next to them in store racks. Saville's most striking early designs, however, teamed him with Factory's flagship band Joy Division, with austere, solemn images that perfectly reflected the group's disconsolate music. But on May 18, 1980, Joy Division vocalist Ian Curtis committed suicide, and when the group's posthumous second album Closer appeared three months later, many voiced their disgust at the sleeve, a photo captured in the tomb of an Italian graveyard--in fact, Saville had completed the package weeks before Curtis' death. When Factory opened its own Manchester nightclub, the Hacienda, the venture initially proved an unmitigated disaster, consuming all of the label's profits; with no money left to pay employees, in 1981 Saville relocated to London, accepting the position of in-house art director with the Virgin Records offshoot Dindisc. He nevertheless remained a consultant to Factory until the label's demise a decade later, working most closely with New Order, the group formed by the surviving members of Joy Division. For their breakthrough hit, 1983's “Blue Monday," he crafted a sleeve modeled after the computer floppy discs used by drummer/programmer Stephen Morris to store sequencer information. The record went on to become the best-selling twelve-inch release in music history, but according to legend, Factory actually lost money because Saville's sleeve was so expensive to produce. In truth, each subsequent pressing was less elaborate and less costly than the one before it, and Factory made a mint--regardless, the story, though apocryphal, underscores the lavish dedication paid by the label to its product, as well as the mythmaking that Factory fostered. Also in 1983, Saville founded his own design firm, Peter Saville Associates, with collaborator Brett Wickens; in addition to his ongoing work with the recording industry, with a portfolio that now included non-Factory projects like Roxy Music's classic Avalon, Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark's self-titled effort and David Byrne and Brian Eno's groundbreaking collaboration My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, he now accepted commissions from London's Whitechapel Art Gallery, the French Ministry of Culture and fashion clients Christian Dior, Yohji Yamamoto, Martin Sitbon and Jil Sander. However, Saville's notorious working habits--his seeming inability to submit work on time, all-night sessions and what one employer declared his “difficulty bridging where artistic self-expression ends and addressing a client's problem begins"--made his professional associations tenuous and typically short-lived. He shuttered Peter Saville Associates in 1990 to begin a partnership with the famed London design studio Pentagram, working on projects for London's Natural Museum of History as well as Los Angeles' Channel 1. But three years later Saville and Wickens left Pentagram, relocating to Los Angeles to join the firm Frankfurt Balkind; within a year, they returned to Britain, where Saville began freelancing for London Records as well as the Italian luggage manufacturer Mandarina Duck. With Factory now bankrupt--and New Order in the midst of a decade-long hiatus--his LP designs turned to a new generation of artists including Pulp and Suede, as well as New Order offshoots Monaco and the Other Two. A quarter century after Factory was founded, Saville remained an influential yet strangely shadowy figure both in music and the larger design community, but when New Order resurfaced in 2001 with Get Ready, it was with the expected Saville sleeve in tow; the following year, he also served as the creative director on Beth Orton's Daybreaker. ~ Jason Ankeny, All Music Guide