The cover art was conceived by Weymouth and Frantz with the help of Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher Walter Bender and his MIT Media Lab team. Using Melody Attack as inspiration, the couple created a collage of red warplanes flying in formation over the Himalayas. The planes are an artistic depiction of Grumman Avenger planes in honour of Weymouth’s father who was a US Navy Admiral. The idea for the back cover included simple portraits of the band members. Weymouth attended MIT regularly during the summer of 1980 and worked with Bender’s colleague, Scott Fisher, on the computer renditions of the ideas. The process was tortuous because computer power was limited in the early 1980s and the mainframe alone took up several rooms. Weymouth and Fisher shared a passion for masks and used the concept to experiment with the portraits. The faces were blotted out with blocks of red colour. Weymouth considered superimposing Eno’s face on top of all four portraits to insinuate his egotism—the producer wanted to be on the cover art together with Talking Heads—but decided against it in the end.
The rest of the artwork and the liner notes were crafted by the graphic designer Tibor Kalman and his company M&Co. Kalman was a fervent critic of formalism and professional design in art and advertisements. He offered his services for free to create publicity, and discussed using unconventional materials such as sandpaper and velour for the LP sleeve. Weymouth, who was sceptical of hiring a designing firm, vetoed Kalman’s ideas and held firm on the MIT computerised images. The designing process made the band members realise that the title Melody Attack was “too flippant” for the music recorded, and they adopted Remain in Light instead. Byrne has noted, “Besides not being all that melodic, the music had something to say that at the time seemed new, transcendent, and maybe even revolutionary, at least for funk rock songs.” The image of the warplanes was relegated to the back of the sleeve and the doctored portraits became the front cover. Kalman later suggested that the planes were not removed altogether because they seemed appropriate during the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979–1981.
Weymouth advised Kalman that she wanted simple typography in a bold sans serif font. M&Co. followed the instructions and came up with the idea of inverting the “A”s in “TALKING HEADS”. Weymouth and Frantz decided to use the joint credit acronym C/T for the artwork, while Bender and Fisher used initials and code names because the project was not an official MIT venture. The design credits read “HCL, JPT, DDD, WALTER GP, PAUL, C/T”. The final mass-produced version of Remain in Light boasted one of the first computer-designed record jackets in the history of music. Psychoanalyst Michael A. Brog has called its front cover a “disarming image, which suggests both splitting and obliteration of identity” and which introduces the listener to the album’s recurring theme of “identity disturbance”; he states, “The image is in bleak contrast to the title with the obscured images of the band members unable to ‘remain in light’.” (via Wikipedia)
