Hasta La Ideas

A new repackaged 25th anniversary edition of Peter Gabriel‘s So album is set for release next week. The package pays due reverence to Peter Saville’s and Brett Wickens’ design of the original 1986 release, widely regarded as a design classic…

Saville’s and Wickens’ original album titling appears foilblocked on the front the white hinged box as above. Open the box to find the cover of the 12″ 60 page casebound book within features the Trevor Key shot of Gabriel that adorned the original release:

“I was asked to come up with ideas for repackaging So for its 25th anniversary,” says Marc Bessant who designed the package. “It was clear from the off that what Peter and Brett had done previously had to be held in high regard, and that the original graphics along with Trevor Key’s portrait of Peter Gabriel was always going to be front and centre.”

“Beyond the original sleeve art, Bessant continues, “I had a colour palette to work with which I would continue through to the individual 12″ record sleeves and finer details like the tail-bands of the book.” The image below shows how the four music discs are housed in the inside front cover of the enclosed book (the two DVDs in the package are stored similarly in the book’s inside back cover):

“Peter Gabriel has long been an exponent of using images instead of words,” Bessant continues, “and many of the hand written lyrics I saw had thumbnail sketches in the margins and so we had the idea of creating icons for each of the songs rather than a regular tracklist.”

The icons which Bessant drew for the tracks can be found foilblocked in pearl on the spine of the box (see topmost image), and are also embossed on the blue 12″ LP sleeve:

“Some were easier [to design] than others,” says Bessant of the icons which were all approved by Gabriel, “some are fairly obvious distillations of the lyrics or title and some, like ‘Dont Give Up’ (which appears on the red sleeve, shown below) for example, were influenced by the video of the time.”

Art direction and design: Marc Bessant. Packaging and production: Daniel Mason of Something Else. All photography shown is by Will Thom.

petergabriel.com.

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