There isn't much to say about the first album cover, which shows the members of the group standing in what looks like it might be a graveyard supply lot. The cover photo is by David Gahr and the cover design was by Haig Adishian. Pictured in V formation from left to right, in case you don't recognize their early look, are Peter Banks, Chris Squire, Jon Anderson, Tony Kaye and Bill Bruford. On the back is the Yes speech balloon, which might have been considered their first logo, and a nice written note from Tony Wilson of Melody Maker magazine. An alternate cover design appears on some editions that show up at record conventions; it shows the "Yes" speech balloon against a black background.

This cover combines the elements of a band photo with a degree of surreality. The band is in the corner of a room; in back are Steve, Chris and Jon, Tony Kaye is in the middle and Bill is in front to the right. Bill sits on the floor instead of in the empty chair. And floating in the center of everything is a mannequin head. Everything has a green tinge. And the cover incorporates the edges of a film strip, as if we were looking at a single frame of a movie. The photography is credited to Phil Franks and Barry Wentzell, and the design to Jon Goodchild.

An early video from this period incorporates the mannequin head, and spins it.

Thus begins the wonderful relationship between Yes and Roger Dean, the popularity of each feeding the other. From what Roger says in Views, the band's idea for the cover was to picture a fractured piece of porcelain whereas his was to create a miniature world. The compromise was to take the miniature world and break it. The result set up a storyline that was later continued on the Yessongs paintings, and served as the inspiration for Jon Anderson's solo album "Olias of Sunhillow," although ironically Roger didn't do the artwork for the latter. On the front we see the bonsai-scaled planet; flying above it is a spaceship of sorts - reminiscent of old sailing ships from the age of exploration. On the back the planet is breaking into pieces; the ship appears in the foreground, now seen from the side. Its job, apparently, is to ferry the planet's population elsewhere.

Besides rescuing the cover from having a rather trite idea of the broken porcelain, Roger's design provided one of the most intriguing images in rock album history. Roger himself, however, has never been all that satisfied with it and has never had the paintings reproduced as posters.

Originally the album also came with an 8-page inset booklet. Inside was a page for each member of the band.There were additional Dean paintings on the front and back covers. (He is also credited with most of the photography). The front cover showed some creatures hiding among a massive tree-root system. They appear to be as frightened as frightening. The back cover shows a lone mountain climber scaling a vertical rock that soars beyond the height of the image, suggesting an infinite climb.

This mountain climbing picture seems as if created to illustrate the song "South Side of the Sky," which is about a group of mountain climbers who die in the cold - but the point of the song being that death need not be feared or seen negatively, rather as a bridge to a new existence. This transition could be seen as the "infinite climb." But it's dangerous to impart too much interpretation to the images, or even to assume the connection between song and story. "Views" states that the paintings and music of Yes were created separately.

The lettering on the cover introduces us to Roger's predilection for connected letters and the treatment of a title as a whole artistic concept rather than as the use of separate letters. It is rendered in a thin white line, again reflecting the "fragile" sense.

Close to the Edge

Usually album cover paintings exist for the purpose of drawing the eye in the record stores. In "Close to the Edge," the concept is turned on its ear by putting a plain color blend on the outside cover and reserving the illustrative painting for the inside fold-out spread.

The inside painting shows a lake poised on the top of a mountain; the water falls in sheets around all sides. A road leads to the lake from the edge of a foreground mountain, across the top of a mini-peak with unsupported bridges. It appears that traveling on it would be extremely dangerous. "Close to the Edge," indeed. The lake is scattered with islands, one of which holds what looks like might be a monastery. It's as if to say that to seek enlightenment, you may have to go through hell and high water; and this is the high water.

This album marks the first use of the now-classic Yes logo, with the extended "tail" of the Y connecting to the S through the middle of the E.

The interesting thing about the photos on the back cover is that they include one of producer Eddie Offord. It is appropriate that he would be honored in this way, as fans would agree that he was integral to the success of Yes in its prime time.

Yessongs

This is an album that really married music and paintings by having so much more than just front and back cover designs. Originally it was three LPs in a massive triple-fold-out package. This allowed for a whole artistic concept to be realized as never before.

Let's start with the paintings. It's well known that they tell a story that was started on the Fragile cover. In "Views" the story is described: "The planet disintegrates but the inhabitants have built a spaceship which on the 'Yessongs' cover is shown guiding fragments of the planet as spores through space. In the second picture ... the spores impregnate a new planet, introducing life (third picture). In the fourth picture the cities evolve."

As noted above, the story is retold in the music and images of Jon Anderson's "Olias of Sunhillow" album. The teardrop mountains also appear on the "Yesshows" cover and, in a way, on the "YesYears" box set painting (see analysis of that one below); and on the "Floating/Waters" painting (used as the cover of the "Supernatural Fairy Tales" Progressive Rock Era box set from Rhino) which is a pastiche of Dean images.

"Views" makes note of the fact that a version of one of the Yessongs paintings included elements that were added separately at the request of others, and that four of the six (at that time) covers Dean had done for Yes had had such changes. On "Yessongs" it is the girl and spaceship from the "Pathways" painting that were added. An unencumbered version without them appeared on the front of the package.

Another interesting note in "Views" is that this was the time Roger first started using an airbrush, and at one point his cat traipsed across the painting, leaving footprints. He tried to obscure them with clouds but if you look closely you can still see them.

Tales From Topographic Oceans

This is considered by many people, myself included, to be Roger Dean's greatest masterpiece. What makes it even more intriguing is that he put together such a cohesive image from a collaborative set of ideas, as described in "Views." Jon Anderson wanted the Mayan pyramid, Alan White suggested the markings from the plains of Nazca, and the rocks come from Dean associate Dominy Hamilton's postcard collection: Brimham Rocks, the Last Rocks at Lands End, the logan rock at Treen, and single stones from Avebury and Stonehenge. I don't know which is which.

Some of the stars in the background are in the constellations of each of the band member's astrological signs.

The painting as a whole has an air of mystery about it: Are we, the viewers, looking at an underwater scene or not? The idea of "Topographic Oceans" is to evoke those National Geographic maps that show how the ocean floor would look if all the water were removed. Who hasn't looked at those maps and wanted to wander around that landscape? Since Roger's paintings often have that quality, of creating a world you can almost wander around in, he was able to capture that feel perfectly. We see a waterfall coming out of the central group of rocks, which would indicate that, like on the maps, the water of this ocean has been removed. And yet there are five fish swimming by. To further confuse matters, an addition made for the sake of the cover is a stream of air surrounding the fish and trailing them from the back side of the rocks. (This is not on the original painting nor on prints and posters of the image; it is better without it.) The sun or moon rises behind the pyramid but there's also a light source coming from above. Someone interpreted the brown woody things around the rocks as the wreckage of the star galleon from Fragile/Yessongs, but I've always thought it was trees or other plants. I'll leave that question to the viewer.

On the inside of the cover the lyrics are interspersed with photos from nature, each set in a Dean frame. Additional graphic elements appear next to each song title and beneath the description of what the songs are all about.

Relayer

Jon Anderson described this album in a TV interview as coming from "a gray period in the band - kind of like the album cover."

This apparent slight dissatisfaction with the rather atonal look of the painting is one I share, but ironically this image is the one Roger declared as his favorite (as of "Views," anyway). When I was in line for his autograph at DragonCon in 1998, I met a young woman who agreed; it was her favorite, and it was the very atonality that she liked about it.

Dean says in "Views," "My intention was to produce a giant 'gothic' cave. A sort of fortified city for military monks; a secret stronghold for a fantasy Knight's Templar."

In "Music of Yes: Structure and Vision in Progressive Rock," Bill Martin interpreted the soldiers on horseback as going off to join the battle that is fought in "The Gates of Delirium." Yeah, maybe.

Inside the cover is a photo of the band (L-R Chris Squire, Steve Howe, Alan White, Jon Anderson and Patrick Moraz) and a poem by Donald Lehmkuhl inspired by the cover painting. In the repackaged CD version is a "new" painting, the bee with a double-helix shell, which was originally created for the inside cover but was left off the original LP version.

Yesterdays

This has two paintings, which were intended to be interchangeable between front and back covers. What ended up as the standard front is twisted tree forms to which were added, separately, the girl-with-butterfly image from the English Time and a Word cover. (Twisted trees are one of the standard icons that have become a Dean staple.) In his note on the collectible card version of the painting Dean says he decided to paint the girl after Giovanni Segantini's "Die Holle der Wollustigen." A search for a sample of this image is under way.

The back shows two naked blue children on another twisted tree-ish form in a swamp. They are in a pose of innocent frankness and are meant to evoke nostalgia for childhood.

Unfortunately both paintings are censored on the collectible card versions. Tree elements are arranged to cover the front girl's breasts and the pelvic areas of the children on the back - even the boy's pee stream. I don't know if Roger went along with these changes or if they were made photographically by the publisher.

Going For the One

Here we come to the first album since The Yes Album to have something other than a Roger Dean cover. This was not necessarily a slight of Roger, however. They still used his logo, and in fact the design company, Hipgnosis, was led by Storm Thorgerson, whom Roger knew. In fact, the publishing company Dean launched called Paper Tiger later published a book full of Hipgnosis album cover designs, "Walk Away Rene," and Storm was co-editor of some of the Album Cover Albums.

The Going For the One design appears in "Walk Away Rene." It shows a naked guy (could it be the blue naked boy from Yesterdays grown up? Nah.) standing before a dizzying array of buildings. Feeding into or out of him are rays of various designs and colors. It may remind us of the line, "I feel lost in the city" from "Heart of the Sunrise," but that was on a different album. I see it as a contrast between man's ultimately natural state (naked) and ultimately unnatural state (surrounded by skyscrapers).

The buildings, by the way, are from Century City in Los Angeles.

Tormato

This probably qualifies as the strangest of all Yes album covers. It's another Hipgnosis cover, again using the Dean logo. It has a black-and-white picture of a man in a suit, shown from the shoulders down, holding sticks (drumsticks? divining rods?). (Interesting that on Time and a Word/Yesterdays we have a woman's body without a head; here we have a man's body without a head; and on The Yes Album we have a mannequin head without a body. I don't know what that means. Probably nothing.) He is standing outdoors near what is probably considered a tor (British parlance for a kind of hillock). This overall image is splattered with a tomato, in keeping with the album title pun.

On the back is a band photo at the same locale. Everyone is wearing sunglasses. Clockwise from top: Rick Wakeman, Jon Anderson, Steve Howe, Alan White and Chris Squire. This photo is also splattered with a tomato.

The inner sleeve has some graphics depicting a topographic map (Tales From Topographic Continents?), apparently showing what is described in text: "Yes Tor is situated two-and-a-half miles from Okehampton, Devon in England, on a clear day, from the top, you can see far away places with strange sounding names." In addition to Yes Tor are Homerton Hill, Black Tor, Dinger Tor, East Mill Tor, Winter Tor, Scarey Tor, Row Tor and Danger Area. On the other side is some kind of numbered geometric design superimposed over an outline of the rock formation shown on the cover.

Drama

We're back to Roger Dean. The painting is brooding and dark - befitting, I think, most of the music inside. It's a landscape, a beach overlooking a body of water dotted with islands and two shipwrecks. In "Magnetic Storm," it's related that these were painted in to obscure a village in the distance that apparently didn't work. In the backgroud are slanted mountains with undercut bases. In the foreground are odd cacti and silhouettes of cats and seagulls.

The Yes logo is rerendered in silver to give it a 3-D, chrome or liquid mercury look. The album title is rendered in angular, jagged lettering for a change of pace appropriate for a time when there had been a major line-up change in the band.

Inside the cats and seagulls appear again, along with a band photo (L-R Trevor Horn, Alan White, Chris Squire, Steve Howe and Geoff Downes). For some reason they all have their arms raised.

Classic Yes

This painting, though used for the album cover of this compilation album, was originally part of the design for a resort that Roger and Martyn Dean had developed that was to be built near Sydney, Australia. Other paintings from that project have appeared here and there, but it was never built. The painting has been given the title "Green Towers." I really like this image and although I had all the songs from the album on other records, I ended up buying a copy of this on eBay just for the cover.

Yesshows

A casual look may not reveal it, but the front and back paintings for Yesshows are two views of the same landscape. This is more clearly shown in the uncropped versions shown in "Magnetic Storm" and reproduced here. On the front a bird flies over a snowy rock outcropping. On the back these rocks are shifted to the left so now we see a path leading to a building carved out of another set of rocks. These are sticking out into space, so we may well wonder if the whole structure is floating in midair (another common Dean theme). The bird is gone, but in the background more structures, familiar as the space spores from Yessongs, emerge from the mist.

Roger didn't consider this set of paintings as all that successful, but I like it, particularly the contrast between cool blue sky and colorful bird with stark gray and white of the snowy rocks.

Inside the cover are, appropriately, photos of the band performing in concert.

90125, 9012Live and Big Generator

A reformed 1980s band with a distinctly different sound, Yes was tremendously altered, as was the tone of its album covers. By now Yes and Roger Dean had been inextricably linked, but now his logo was gone and the cover designs are almost precisely the antithesis of Dean covers. Dean had given us surreal landscapes, organic forms, curvy logos. Now we have straightedged graphics with no "picture" at all.

On 90125 the main design element is a new logo - a Y whose upper arms are curved around an oval that's cut into a three-piece pie. The pieces are solid blue, yellow and pink. All this on a silver background. Ho, and may I say, hum.

9012Live adopts this design and alters it a little. The Y is now shown at an angle and instead of an oval there's a triangle in the middle. Underneath is a representation of Earth's continents, conveying the "world tour" aspect of the live EP. The photos on the back are from the concert film of the same name. The original version of the Y logo appears there, too.

Big Generator is easily the most disappointing of all Yes album covers. It is nothing but garishly colored graphics and lettering spelling out the album title: "Big" on the front and "Generator" on the back. The Y logo has been further altered; it is duplicated and superimposed on itself with one stretching vertically and the other seen at a shallow angle.

These designs were produced on a computer (the details appear in the 90125 notes; I'm not reproducing them here because I don't think anybody cares), by Garry Mouat for Assorted Images, which is apparently a design company with no taste whatsoever.

Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe

Although technically not a Yes album, I need to discuss it here not only because ABWH was made up of sometime Yes members but because it reintroduces Roger Dean and gives us the first example of what I call his Desert Period (which he may well still be in). In fact the painting is entitled "Blue Desert." Roger has several paintings inspired by the rock formations of Utah and Arizona. Many are virtually devoid of vegetation, animal life or artificial structures; the ABWH cover may be seen as transitional because it does have those elements.

The rock pillars of the foreground and the mesas of the background are paralleled with a building, an example of Dean's curvilinear architecture designs. The other building in the background, behind the tree, has a bird shape that virtually mirrors the eagle in the foreground.

Above the image is the band name spelled out in a new lettering design; unlike some of his other lettering like on "Yesterdays" and "Yesshows," there's been a whole alphabet created so it could be used in other projects, including the logo for Arista, the record company which published ABWH.

On the back is another desert landscape. It is entitled "Red Desert." A snakelike form is draped across the foreground rocks, but there's a piece missing, while chunks of it float in midair above. (That bit strikes me as bizarre even for Roger. He describes it as "never finished" in the collectible card notes; maybe that's why.)

Inside is another graphic element, probably created with Kai's Power Tools, using the ABWH initials in yet another lettering style. The background appears to be a photo of the sea floor with a crab in the middle but I could be wrong.

There's a photo inside (L-R Rick Wakeman, Jon Anderson, Bill Bruford and Steve Howe) which not only updates us on what these guys looked like by this time but catches them in what looks like might have been a goof-off moment during the photo shoot. Hooray for whoever decided to use this instead of a standard Guys Standing There Looking Serious photo.

Union

This may be the first album design of Dean's that was made with the recognition that it would be limited to the CD format. The front cover painting, entitled "The Guardians," is a classic example of Dean's Desert Period, as is the back cover painting, "Tsunami." The latter is also an example of a favorite idea of Roger's, to imagine rock splashing in liquid form but then suddenly solidifying.

The arcing forms on the front are highly reminiscent of "Relayer." The old has become new again.

The classic Yes logo is reinterpreted again; ironically the connected letters are now disconnected. The Union title is rendered in another lettering style. And tucked into the corner is the first appearance of a new Roger Dean Yes logo. This was developed at a time when, because of the changes the band was going through, it wasn't certain the classic logo could be used. (Steve Howe co-owns the copyright on it, which is why it wasn't in place on 90125 through Big Generator, nor on Talk - he was not in the band at those points). The new square logo evokes a Chinese ideogram. Roger says he wasn't entirely comfortable with creating a new Yes logo, nor is he certain it's successful, but he does do a sketch of it with some of his autographs.

Inside the cover booklet are computer graphics by Roger Dean and Kai Krause. Kai is the creator of Kai's Power Tools, KPT Bryce, Kai's Photo Soap and other graphics software. He has worked with Roger on various projects, including Steve Howe's Turbulence cover.

YesYears

Naturally the box set design borrows from Yes album covers of the past. The most obvious is the waterfall from Tales From Topographic Oceans. Additionally the floating rocks are brought over from the ABWH live album "Evening of Yes Music Plus." And the giant Y-shaped stone structure is declared by Roger to be of the type that landed on the planet in Yessongs; he interprets them as having evolved into "cities;" in fact the title of this painting is Yellow City. Apparently the upper platform area is hidden from view. I've also wondered if the lines and angles of the Y weren't borrowed from the buildings on Going For the One.

Here we have in play not only the two Dean logos, both extended into the box title, but also the Y logo from 90125. I don't know if including the latter was an acquiescence on Roger's part or if it was added by the record company.

On each of the 4 discs inside is a Dean abstract - essentially splotches of paint. The square logo appears on each one, along with hash marks indicating Disc 1, Disc 2, etc.

Talk

After the Union fiasco, the band returned temporarily to the 90125 "YesWest" lineup. Without Steve Howe, Dean was out of the picture as well so it came time for yet another new logo. Peter Max was enlisted to create it.

Peter Max is a talented guy; I loved the posters he created in the '60s. But it's gotten to the point that any Yes cover that's not Dean is a disappointment.

For his logo Max created splotchy black letters with blended colors inside them. The blended colors are the one Deanesque element; the classic Yes logo often had them. This new logo was used as the principal design element of the cover; the name Talk is hand printed in the upper right corner. Inside the album are graphics, multicolored squares and other elements. I don't know if Max created them or if they were part of the art direction credited to Paul Rivas.

Keys to Ascension and KTA 2

Needless to say, Roger Dean is back with the reunited classic lineup. The intertwined arches were an idea of Jon Anderson's; they also fit within Dean's splashing rocks motifs.

On KTA 1 the arches bridge islands in a lake or sea. On the inside the same scene, almost, is shown in another time; the foreground arch is now moss-covered. I say "almost" because now the right-hand arches from the cover are mirror-reflected to continue to the right, instead of there being a different arch there. The sky now has a green tint. There are also photos inside from the San Luis Obispo, Calif., concerts where the live portions of the album were recorded.

On KTA 2 the arches now connect, you guessed it, islands floating in the air over the water. In the background are more leading to a large "city" of Dean's organic architecture. Interestingly the slipcover version has a magenta background while the booklet's is blue.

The photos in both booklets are by the Gottlieb Brothers of Yes Magazine. Booklet design is credited to them and packaging to Roger Dean's brother Martyn. Both packages have fold-out posters of the cover paintings.

Open Your Eyes

The next album had, unfortunately, a non-picture cover. In recognition of the 25th anniversary of the now-classic Roger Dean logo, it is featured as the only design element on the cover, against a black background. It may be seen as reflecting the one version of the very first Yes album cover that just showed the speech balloon logo.

I had been hoping for something along the lines of the T-shirt design developed for the 1997 fall tour; it showed the logo tied by stalks to a giant eyeball.

The Ladder

A series of sandcastle-like towers are connected by ascending bridges, appropriate to the album's title. If you look really closely you can see people on the bridge, some of them in shadow.

On the back an inset showing the full painting appears, revealing that Roger couldn't resist throwing one more floating island in. The inset appears against a portion of the painting that has been mirror-reversed.

As if in answer to the use of the classic logo as the only design element on "Open Your Eyes," there are no appearances of it on "The Ladder" at all. The square logo appears throughout.

Also appearing next to the spine, through the clear jewelbox, are six graphic elements reminiscent of those in "Tales From Topographic Oceans." These are also featured in the computer game "Homeworld," for which the song of the same title was written.

House of Yes

Subtitled "Live From House of Blues." The square logo is joined by a colorful dragonfly. Inside are photos from the tour by Robin Kauffman and the Gottlieb brothers. Design is credited to Martyn Dean, with artwork by Roger of course.