10 Pink Floyd Album Covers We Love

During the fall of 1975, I was walking past a record store in Long Island’s Smith Haven Mall when a large poster caught my eye in the window of Sam Goody. At the time, Sam Goody was one of the largest record-store chains in New York State. The poster featured two men shaking hands. That image might not have seemed unusual if one of the men had not been engulfed in flames.

I was only thirteen and still learning about music, so at that moment I had never heard of that guy called “Pink Floyd.” The album cover looked so cool and mysterious that I begged my reluctant mother to buy the Pink Floyd album for me. I bought it and was completely surprised by what I heard when I got home. It sounded unlike anything I had heard before. The cover still made no sense to me, but I loved staring at it while listening to the songs. Somehow, the music and the image made sense together in an ambiguous way.

This list is not about the music, however. It is about choosing ten of the greatest Pink Floyd album covers. In the age of the LP, cover art played a major role at the point of purchase. Fans who grew up buying records from the 1960s through the mid-1980s often remember sitting in their bedrooms, listening to vinyl and studying every detail of the artwork. With Pink Floyd, we also tried to figure out what those remarkable covers meant.

# 10 – The Piper at the Gates of Dawn

The Piper at the Gates of Dawn is one of the few Pink Floyd studio albums to place the band members directly on the front cover. Pink Floyd’s debut album was released in the United Kingdom on August 5, 1967. Photographer Vic Singh created the image with a prism lens that produced the fractured, kaleidoscopic effect surrounding Syd Barrett, Roger Waters, Richard Wright, and Nick Mason.

The saturated colors and repeated faces matched the psychedelic character of the era and the music. Singh received the prism lens from George Harrison of The Beatles, an extraordinary connection between two of the most important British bands of the 1960s.

# 9 – Meddle

Meddle was released in 1971, and its cover has often been described as one of Hipgnosis’ least successful Pink Floyd designs. I have never agreed with that judgment for one simple reason: I spent years trying to determine what I was looking at. The image’s ambiguity is precisely what made it interesting enough to earn a place on this list.

The Shine On box set explained the intent behind the cover of Meddle. The image is a close-up photograph of an ear underwater, with the ripples representing sound waves. The photograph was reversed and rotated, making the subject even harder to identify. What initially appears to be an abstract field of blue and green becomes an image about listening itself.

[1] Storm Thorgerson and Stylorouge, Pink Floyd Box Set, Pink Floyd Music/Sony Music Entertainment, 1992.

# 8 – A Momentary Lapse of Reason

If only Photoshop had been available in 1987, Pink Floyd might have saved a great deal of money while creating the cover of A Momentary Lapse of Reason. Instead, Storm Thorgerson and photographer Robert Dowling arranged hundreds of hospital beds across Saunton Sands in North Devon. When rain interrupted the first attempt, the crew had to dismantle the installation and begin again.

Dozens of workers and heavy equipment were required to move and position the beds. The concept grew from the album’s imagery of empty beds and suggested illness, absence, dreams, and madness. The sweeping beach, rows of real beds, distant figure, and dramatic sky transformed an enormous practical production into one unforgettable photograph. Dowling’s image remains one of the most ambitious Pink Floyd covers ever staged.

# 7 – Animals

How many people realize that the cover of Pink Floyd’s Animals began as a photograph of an inflatable pig flying over Battersea Power Station? This was long before digital compositing became an everyday design tool. Roger Waters conceived the image, and Hipgnosis organized a three-day shoot around the power station’s imposing industrial architecture.

During the shoot, the helium-filled pig broke free from its moorings, drifted into the flight path above London, and eventually came down in Kent. The final sleeve combined the pig photographed on one day with the power-station image captured on another. The smoke, chimneys, deep shadows, and tiny airborne animal turned the cover into a bleak and instantly recognizable work of art.

# 6 – Ummagumma

Released in 1969, Ummagumma featured one of the earliest Pink Floyd covers designed by Hipgnosis. Its central visual device resembles the Droste effect, in which an image contains a smaller version of itself. Hipgnosis complicated the Droste effect idea by changing the positions of the band members inside each successive frame rather than simply repeating the same photograph.

The cover has fascinated generations of Pink Floyd fans who search for hidden clues in every object. The Gigi soundtrack sitting on the floor became one of its most discussed details; on many North American pressings, that tiny album cover was altered or removed because of copyright concerns. The shifting band members, impossible picture-within-a-picture construction, and unexplained objects make Ummagumma a delight to study.

# 5 – More

The soundtrack to Barbet Schroeder’s French film More earns its place on this list because of the dramatic use of color and silhouette. The Hipgnosis cover transformed a film image into an orange-and-blue duotone that feels less like a conventional movie still than a half-remembered dream.

The cold blue figures stand sharply against the burning orange background, creating a ghostly effect that matches the atmospheric textures Pink Floyd created for the soundtrack. The film itself dealt primarily with addiction rather than the Cold War imagery the colors might suggest, yet the sleeve remains haunting, mysterious, and difficult to forget.

# 4 – A Saucerful of Secrets

The densely layered imagery on Pink Floyd’s A Saucerful of Secrets offers one of the strongest arguments for experiencing album artwork at full LP size. A compact disc booklet, and especially a tiny digital thumbnail, cannot reveal the same wealth of superimposed photographs, cosmic forms, colors, and illustrated details spread across a twelve-inch sleeve.

Released in 1968, A Saucerful of Secrets was the first Pink Floyd album cover created by Hipgnosis. The collage includes planetary imagery, alchemical symbols, and artwork drawn from a Doctor Strange comic. Like the music recorded at EMI Studios on Abbey Road, the cover seems to move between outer space, fantasy, and altered states of consciousness.

The longer one studies the sleeve, the more its layers begin to reveal themselves. That is one of the great pleasures of album art: the listener brings personal imagination to the images, and the images change as the music changes.

[2] Storm Thorgerson and Stylorouge, Pink Floyd Box Set, Pink Floyd Music/Sony Music Entertainment, 1992, p. 32.

# 3 – The Division Bell

Talk about making a statement. Bam! This cover hits you immediately: two enormous metal head sculptures facing each other in a Cambridgeshire field, photographed in the cold light of dawn. The silver surfaces stand sharply against the blue sky and brown landscape. At first, I simply enjoyed the beauty and precision of the photograph.

Repeated viewings reveal the visual trick. The two profiles can also be seen as a single face looking directly at the viewer, with the illuminated mouths becoming the teeth of that third face. Ely Cathedral appears in the distance between the sculptures, adding another vertical form to the composition.

Storm Thorgerson created the concept, Keith Breeden designed the metal heads, and sculptor John Robertson constructed them. The photograph that graced The Division Bell proved that monumental physical objects, careful positioning, natural light, and a real landscape could still create something more arresting than a purely digital image.

# 2 – The Dark Side of the Moon

Can you think of another album cover or logo that defines Pink Floyd’s legacy more completely than The Dark Side of the Moon? The prism has appeared on countless shirts, posters, calendars, notebooks, and pieces of memorabilia. Its impact comes from one of design’s oldest lessons: less is more.

Hipgnosis presented a black field crossed by white light entering a prism and emerging as a spectrum. Richard Wright had requested something cleaner, more graphic, and less pictorial than the band’s earlier covers. Roger Waters also connected the triangular form with ambition and thought, while the refracted light reflected Pink Floyd’s stage lighting and the album’s themes.

The band was shown several possible designs, but all four members immediately selected the prism created by George Hardie from the Hipgnosis concept. The image was simple enough to recognize instantly and rich enough to carry through the gatefold, posters, stickers, and decades of cultural reuse.

The Dark Side of the Moon has repeatedly appeared near the top of lists celebrating the greatest album covers in rock history. It would have been an easy choice for number one here. But lists are subjective, and one Pink Floyd sleeve left an even deeper impression on me.

[3] Storm Thorgerson and Stylorouge, Pink Floyd Box Set, Pink Floyd Music/Sony Music Entertainment, 1992.

# 1 – Wish You Were Here

When Wish You Were Here was first released, the vinyl sleeve was hidden inside black shrink-wrap with only a circular sticker on the front. That sticker showed two mechanical hands shaking. According to the liner notes for the Pink Floyd box set Shine On, the handshake represented an empty gesture, reflecting the band’s disillusionment with the music business.

Beneath the black wrapping was the now-classic photograph of two businessmen shaking hands while one of them burned. Stuntman Ronnie Rondell Jr. was genuinely set on fire for the shoot on the Warner Bros. backlot in Burbank, California. The picture transformed the phrase “getting burned” in a bad deal into a startling visual metaphor.

The rest of the packaging explored absence, loneliness, failed communication, and emotional emptiness. The burning businessman, the faceless salesman, the empty desert, the diver who creates no splash, and the mechanical handshake all supported the album’s themes on a visual plane. As clear as the title Wish You Were Here may seem, the packaging gave that longing a far more complex form.

I understood none of those interpretations when I bought the record at thirteen. I simply thought it looked cool and outrageous enough to show my middle-school friends, most of whom had never heard of Pink Floyd. The deeper meanings became apparent only later, but the cover had already done its job: it stopped me in my tracks and made me want to know what was inside.

In the fall of 1975, the burning-handshake image appeared in record-store windows and in magazines including Creem, Circus, and Rolling Stone. After the enormous success of Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd faced the impossible task of following one of the most celebrated albums ever made. The music on Wish You Were Here met that challenge, and its packaging became a landmark in its own right.

As far as Pink Floyd album covers are concerned, at least on this list, Wish You Were Here stands easily at number one.

Updated August 3, 2026.

10 Pink Floyd Album Covers We Love article published on ClassicRockHistory.com © 2026