Description

James Brook
A Factory Alphabet

Factory Records was a Manchester-based independent record label, established in 1978 by Tony Wilson, Alan Erasmus and Rob Gretton. Aside from releasing music from highly-influential bands such as Joy Division, Happy Mondays and New Order, Factory were known for commissioning visually-arresting sleeve designs from designers such as Mark Farrow, 8vo and Peter Saville alongside three seminal buildings from architect Ben Kelly. This distinct visual output was often shrouded in mystery, with the name of the band and title of the record sometimes not appearing on the sleeve. For many of the post-punk generation Factory became an aesthetic education; not only were Factory followers introduced to the nuances of design language but to cultural ideas such as Situationism and praxis. Factory’s legacy still resonates today, influencing a generation with a blueprint to create, and to aspire for more out of life.


This booklet, made as my final major project while I was a student on the ABC Digital Graphics Course at the London College of Communication, is called A Factory Alphabet. For each letter of the alphabet I have compiled a short text and gathered images of people, places or products connected with Factory Records. The booklet shows the products that were released by Factory such as B is for ‘Blue Monday’ (a 12-inch single) or L is for ‘Low-life’ (an album by New Order) and also bands that appeared on the Factory label for example A is for A Certain Ratio. The booklet also features characters connected with Factory, for example W is for Tony Wilson and S is for Peter Saville. The project highlights some of the ideas that have informed Factory’s ethos, for example P is for Praxis - Tony Wilson took the Marxist idea of praxis as meaning “You learn why you do something by actually doing it.”

www.factoryalphabet.info