Packaging
The cover artwork shows the members of the band, with a picture hanging on the wall showing the same scene, except that the band members have switched positions. The picture on the wall also includes the picture on the wall, creating a recursion effect (i. e. the Droste effect), with each recursion showing band members exchanging positions. After four variations of the scene, the final picture within picture is the cover of the previous Pink Floyd album, A Saucerful of Secrets. The latter, however, is absent from the CD release; instead, the recursion effect is seemingly ad infinitum. Hipgnosis also prepared an advert for EMI repeating the exercise with different band positions, Richard Wright now as the dominant seated figure hitherto the least so on the album cover. The illustration was bigger than the cover therefore the number of iterations toward infinity had to be increased.
The cover of the original LP varies between the British, American/Canadian, and Australian releases. The British version has the album Gigi leaning against the wall immediately above the "Pink Floyd" letters. At a talk given at Borders bookstore in Cambridge on 1 November 2008, as part of the "City Wakes" project, Storm Thorgerson explained that the album was introduced as a red herring to provoke debate, and that it has no intended meaning. On most copies of American and Canadian editions, the Gigi cover is airbrushed to a plain white sleeve, apparently because of copyright concerns; however the earliest American copies do show the Gigi cover, and it was restored for the American remastered CD edition. On the Australian edition, the Gigi cover is completely airbrushed, not even leaving a white square behind. The house used as the location for the front cover of the album is located in Great Shelford, near Cambridge.
On the rear cover, roadies Alan Styles (who also appears in "Alan's Psychedelic Breakfast") and Peter Watts (father of the actress Naomi Watts) are shown with the band's equipment laid out on a runway at Biggin Hill Airport. This concept was proposed by Mason, with the intention of replicating the "exploded" drawings of military aircraft and their payloads, which were popular at the time.
Song titles on the back are laid out slightly differently in British vs. North American editions; the most important difference being the inclusion of subtitles for the four sections of "A Saucerful of Secrets". These subtitles only appeared on American and Canadian editions of this album, but not on the British edition; nor did they appear on original pressings of A Saucerful of Secrets.
The inner gatefold art shows separate black-and-white photos of the band members. Gilmour is seen standing in front of the Elfin Oak. Original vinyl editions showed Waters with his first wife, Judy Trim, but she has been cropped out of the picture on most CD editions (with the original photo's caption 'Roger Waters (and Jude)' accordingly changed to just 'Roger Waters'). The uncropped picture was restored for the album's inclusion in the box set, Oh, by the Way.
Read more about this topic: Sysyphus