John Warwicker, Da Gama and Tomato: Designing the Sound of a Generation
We're widening the lens on this blog. Alongside the artists we work with, we'll also be exploring designers, studios and musicians we don't (yet!) collaborate with, because great album cover design doesn't happen in a vacuum.
The best sleeves, past and present, are shaped by a web of influences, rivalries and happy accidents, and telling that wider story gives us a richer picture of where the art form has been and where it's heading. To kick things off, we're going to look at John Warwicker and the studios he was part of: Da Gama and Tomato. This post draws on an interview with Warwicker in Classic Pop magazine from November 2017 and from Warwicker’s own website.
"Music mattered, it shaped our world – record covers were flags of allegiance proudly displayed under your arm every Saturday as you returned from the record store” John Warwicker.
Hypergallery’s guiding statement has always been that record covers are the timeline of our lives. This is a lived truth for designer John Warwicker, for whom they have been a lifelong obsession. The sleeves he created out of that passion have been cherished by music fans since the late 1970s.
Growing up on the right street
Warwicker grew up in South East London, UK, and attended Dulwich College where he became friends with David Rhodes, who went on to work extensively with Peter Gabriel. In that circle, music was a way of life.
Cow gum and a very big break
His first commission came when jazz-fusion band Landscape asked him to design a gig poster. They liked it, and he ended up designing their debut album cover. In those days, embarking on an artwork meant gathering together board, Letraset, photographic prints and typographic printouts stuck down with cow gum, with acetate overlays marked up in Rotring pen.
For the follow-up, From the Tea-rooms of Mars, the band found a ceramic sculptor and the record company helped photograph the piece. John's contribution was the lettering, along with the logo and band portraits. Early computer printouts weren't sharp enough, so he drew them by hand. The result looked computer generated but was a high-tech look made with low-tech equipment and, as with works by Hipgnosis, the resulting piece is somehow imbued with that sense of time invested.
80s Sleeve Design: The Da Gama Story
John Warwicker’s route into 80s sleeve design started early. While studying in Birmingham, he designed some of the first gig posters for Duran Duran. Back in London, he joined Freur, the band of Rick Smith and Karl Hyde (later of Underworld), as video DJ. Freur used a symbol instead of a name, years before Prince did. When the label said its computer system couldn’t handle a symbol, John said he could. The symbol stayed, though the label insisted on lettering too.
Da Gama: Sleeves and Videos Under One Roof
Along with Alex McDowell, Tom Bowyer and James Gracie, Warwicker founded Da Gama; one of the first studios to art direct both sleeves and videos.
One of Warwicker’s favourite projects was Blue Sunshine by The Glove, a side project of Robert Smith and Steve Severin.
Its hypnotic swirl was inspired by The Beatles, and the inner sleeve used a blue inspired by the shade so famously claimed by Yves Klein.
"The design work for The Glove is amongst my favourites created with Da Gama. It was a team effort." John Warwicker
Da Gama also worked on Tim Pope’s I Want to Be a Tree, then moved into the mainstream with Fiat Lux, Bananarama and Marilyn.
After Da Gama
When Da Gama closed, Warwicker and Gracie set up x=x, which designed The Cult’s Love. Warwicker then became art director and head of video at A&M, working on Iggy Pop and Suzanne Vega. As creative director at Vivid ID, he art directed and designed the cover for The Rolling Stones’ Steel Wheels.
Enter Tomato
By the end of the 80s, Warwicker has said that he felt his portfolio no longer felt like him. With like-minded friends, he formed a collective with no rules, just an obsession with making work and exploring visual language. In 1991, Tomato was born.
Tomato was a loose collective of artists, designers and musicians rather than a conventional design studio. The founding crew included John Warwicker, Steve Baker, Dirk van Dooren, Simon Taylor and Graham Wood, along with Karl Hyde and Rick Smith, the two creative cores of Underworld. They went on to design all of Underworld's sleeves, plus their show projections and most of their videos. That overlap is why the sleeves feel so tied to the music: the band were part of the same gang making the artwork, not just clients handing over a brief.
Underworld's record covers look the way the music sounds: dense, restless and a bit overwhelming in the best way. Rather than slapping a moody photo on the front and calling it a day, Tomato treated type as the main event, chopping up words, stacking them in tight, jittery blocks, and layering scraps of text, symbols and imagery until the sleeve felt like a glitching city at 3am.
It's very 90s, but not in a dated way. It's more like staring at a wall of signage, graffiti and half-heard conversations all at once, which is basically what Hyde's stream-of-consciousness lyrics feel like too. The result is that the artwork never just sits beside the music. It's part of the same world, all fragments and repetition and little bursts of meaning you piece together yourself.
Tomato worked across graphic design, film, music videos and advertising (they made ads for the likes of Nike and Levi’s), and their style leaned hard into experimental typography and layered, collage-like visuals. They also put out a book of their work, Process: A Tomato Project, which became a bit of a cult object among designers.
The collective was always more about a shared way of seeing than a single house look, which helps explain how they could make something as noisy and fragmented as an Underworld sleeve and still have it feel like part of a bigger creative world.
He also art-directed several Duran Duran sleeves, including Astronaut in 2004 alongside films and projections for their live shows.
Warwicker has been a mentor, visiting lecturer and external assessor and adviser on courses at the Royal College of Art, London and Central St Martins, London and other renowned institutions both in the UK and further afield in Tokyo, New Zealand and Melbourne where he now lives.
Explore more of John's work at johnwarwicker.com.
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We’d love your help shaping what comes next. If there’s an artist, designer or sleeve you think deserves a closer look, tell us and we’ll consider it for a future post. If you’d rather write about it yourself, we welcome guest posts too, and every contributor will be fully credited. Get in touch with your ideas and we’ll take it from there.
