Here’s a proper photo of Blue Monday from the 2003 Peter Saville exhibit at the Design Museum London. I love that they’ve included the floppy disk in the case. I can imagine plenty of people looking at the 12” sleeve and having no idea what it was referencing.
Post-Modernism sometimes gets a bum rap for being tacky or trading in empty mash-ups. But I think that’s starting to change now that we’ve got enough distance from the ’80s. Saville really nailed post-modernism. It certainly helped that he tempered his work with doses of modernism and neo-classicism, but at its root his work is about appropriation and recontextualisation. You might look at the Blue Monday sleeve and think it’s an overly clever one-note joke, if not for the overall austerity of the design. Even if you don’t get the floppy disk reference, the design works on a purely aesthetic level; it looks new and enigmatic, kubrickian.
I got my first copy of the 12” in 1985 before I had any idea who New Order were. In the context of that era, you can’t discount the semiotic power of placing a vinyl disk inside an oversized floppy disk package, and that’s even before you learn that Saville was inspired by the floppy disk used for data storage with New Order’s Emulator sampling keyboard. The packaging, media, content, and music production methods were all in sync, playing off each other, creating meaning.
(Here’s another photo in which you can read the text under the floppy disk.)
(photo via ceremony60)
