_FAC No.

_Peter Saville is famous for the design of record sleeves for Factory Records artists, most notably for Joy Division and New Order.

Influenced by a fellow student, Malcolm Garrett, who had begun designing for the Manchester punk group, the Buzzcocks, and by Herbert Spencer's Pioneers of Modern Typography, Saville was inspired by Jan Tschichold, chief propagandist for the New Typography. According to Saville: "Malcolm had a copy of Herbert Spencer's Pioneers of Modern Typography. The one chapter that he hadn't reinterpreted in his own work was the cool, disciplined "New Typography" of Tschichold and its subtlety appealed to me. I found a paralled in it for the New Wave that was evolving out of Punk."

Saville entered the music scene after meeting Tony Wilson, the journalist and television presenter, whom he approached at a Patti Smith show in 1978. This resulted in Wilson commissioning the first Factory Records poster (FAC 1). Saville became a partner of Factory Records along with Wilson, Rob Gretton and Alan Erasmus.

Saville's album design for Joy Division's last album, Closer, released shortly after Ian Curtis's suicide in May 1980, was controversial[citation needed] in its depiction of Christ's body entombed. However, the design pre-dated Curtis' death, a fact which rock magazine the New Musical Express was able to confirm, since it had been displaying proofs of the artwork on its walls for several months.

Saville's output from this period included reappropriation from art and design. Design critic Alice Twemlow wrote: "...in the 1980s... he would directly and irreverently "lift" an image from one genre—art history for example—and recontextualize it in another. A Fantin-Latour "Roses" painting in combination with a color-coded alphabet became the seminal album cover for New Order's Power, Corruption and Lies (1983),