Best Yes Album Covers: 10 Classics From Roger Dean And Hipgnosis

9: ‘Union’ (1991)

Beginning a new decade as a prog-rock supergroup, Yes brought together band members past and present for their 1991 album, Union, with different line-ups of the group’s history colliding in a challenging mélange of otherworldly AOR. To mark the occasion, Roger Dean synthesised the band’s trademark iconography with his well-established love for landscape paintings, featuring curved rock formations coiling together as if discovered in some far-flung world. Drawing inspiration from the majestic mountains of Utah and Arizona, Dean’s artwork earns its place among the best Yes album covers for capturing a unique moment when wayward creative impulses converged.

8: ‘The Ladder’ (1999)

With Jon Anderson penning lyrics steeped in new-age philosophy at the dawn of the millennium, Yes’ 18th album, The Ladder, once again saw Roger Dean create one of the best Yes album covers: a fantastical depiction of pointy peaks seemingly defying the laws of gravity while distant figures explore a sloping mountain pass. The rear cover goes one step further, including a rock shaped like a spinning top suspended in thin air. “Floating rocks, I love them!” Dean later said. “For me, they give a fantastic sense of tranquillity and peace, and I love that. I am actively looking for a spiritual path in the paintings.”

7: ‘Going For The One’ (1977)

Yes’ eighth studio album, Going For The One, saw the band leave Roger Dean’s realm of fantasy behind to work with Hipgnosis – a maverick team of graphic designers famous for their work with Pink Floyd – for the very first time. “I remember both Jon Anderson and Steve Howe stressing the importance of kundalini in their music and lyrics,” Hipgnosis co-founder Storm Thorgerson later said. “Having gathered that this was some kind of spiritual energy distributed in key points around the body, I envisaged a naked man in a quasi Da Vinci pose with force lines emanating from his lower back.” Going For The One’s sci-fi-tinged sleeve was a postmodern volte-face among the best Yes album covers, pointing the way to new sonic horizons.

6: ‘Drama’ (1980)

With their 1980 album, Drama, the legendary prog-rock group embraced the unknown following the departure of frontman Jon Anderson. With Buggles members Trevor Horn and Geoff Downes joining and prompting a new-wave-friendly rejuvenation in the band’s sound, it fell to Roger Dean’s album cover to create a sense of visual continuity for long-term Yes fans. Featuring a glacier under grey clouds, with black cats roaming free in the foreground, Drama earns itself a spot among the best Yes album covers for proving how integral Dean was in helping the group weather their many line-up changes. “I was very interested in having a very stormy sky; that was something I was really interested in,” Dean said. “I was very interested in the light playing across the landscape, so there were some bits that jumped out and very stark and bright, and other bits that are very dark.”

5: ‘Yessongs’ (1973)

Yes’ first-ever live album, the triple-disc Yessongs, was released in May 1973, less than a year after the group’s masterpiece, Close To The Edge. Selling more than a million copies, the album owes much of its success to Roger Dean’s beguiling artwork, which gives us a glimpse of a surreal landscape within the body of what appears to be a jellyfish, its neon-green tentacles glowing like hallucinogenic tendrils. The landscape art itself was created with watercolours, and the image was almost ruined when Dean’s cat walked all over it. “You can see the cat’s footprints in the sky,” the artist has acknowledged. “I tried to paint out his footprints with clouds, but that didn’t work, so they remain visible.” You might have to squint to see them, but it’s a happy accident like this that places the final result among the best Yes album covers.

4: ‘Close To The Edge’ (1972)

Widely considered to be one of the best album covers of all time, Roger Dean’s design for Close To The Edge may look minimalist at first glance – a gradient-style backdrop going from black to green – but it also marked the first appearance of Yes’ iconic “bubble” logo. Created in a pre-Photoshop era, without the aid of computers, the seamless transition from one colour to another is nothing short of remarkable. However, Dean’s plans for what would become one of the best Yes album covers were originally much more ambitious, as he proposed a work of landscape art that would later find its home inside the record’s gatefold packaging. “When we discussed doing the sleeve they came up with the title Close To The Edge and I came up with a painting which went down very well (a vast overflowing lake on a mountaintop),” Dean recalled. “But they said they wanted just the logo on the cover. The painting went inside with no text on it, which was very nice.”

3: ‘Tales From Topographic Oceans’ (1973)

Fresh from designing a book jacket for The View Over Atlantis, by John Michell, Roger Dean joined Yes for a tour of Japan. Just as Dean and Jon Anderson were discussing the group’s next album, Tales From Topographic Oceans, the group’s aircraft flew over the Siberian Plains. “I was telling Jon all about this book, about patterns in the landscape and dragon lines,” Dean later explained. “The idea of… a sort of magical landscape… that informed everything: the album cover, the merchandising, the stage.” Perfectly invoking the songs’ spiritual themes of Shastric philosophy with references to ley lines, ancient rock formations such as Stonehenge, and the Nazca geoglyphs, the resulting album cover was an awe-inspiring cosmic wonder that found earthbound beauty under a canopy of glittering stars. Easily one of the best Yes album covers, Tales From Topographic Oceans marked a high point in the artistic bond between Yes and Dean.

2: ‘Fragile’ (1971)

With its apocalyptic depiction of planet Earth coming apart at the seams and disintegrating into the celestial ether, Yes’ fourth studio album, Fragile, marked the first time the group commissioned artwork from artist Roger Dean, leading to the creation of one of the best Yes album covers and to the birth of an era-defining partnership. By conveying a precipitous sense of foreboding over environmental catastrophe, the Fragile design not only chimed with the ecologically-attuned hippies of the era but also gave Dean a reach seam of inspiration to return to for future Yes artworks – what Dean described as “The idea of a world breaking up and little segments of the world becoming spores, and then another world becoming alive from the seeds sent through space.” Subsequent works, such as the sleeve for Yessongs, revealed that Earth’s inhabitants had built a spaceship to escape their doomed planet.

1: ‘Relayer’ (1974)

Claimed to be Roger Dean’s own personal favourite Yes album cover, Relayer saw the artist embrace medieval influences, retreating from the bright watercolours of his previous work in favour of the muted greys of a pencil drawing. “My intention was to produce a giant ‘gothic’ cave,” Dean later said. “A sort of fortified city for military monks.” As snaking rocks conjure a sense of biblical evil and fish-scale patterns feel like harbingers of war, the Relayer artwork is a poetic allegory of a mystical crusade, featuring warriors on horseback on their way to battle. With stone moai heads looking out from the rockface, the design was arguably Dean’s greatest artistic triumph, and that’s why it tops this list of the best Yes album covers.

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