The Beatles ninth album was designed by Richard Hamilton, a notable pop artist who had organized a Marcel Duchamp retrospective at the Tate Gallery the previous year. Hamilton’s design was in stark contrast to Peter Blake’s vivid cover art for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and consisted of a plain white sleeve. The band’s name was discreetly embossed slightly below the middle of the album’s right side, and the cover also featured a unique stamped serial number, “to create,” in Hamilton’s words, “the ironic situation of a numbered edition of something like five million copies.” Hamilton staked his whole design on achieving this effect:  “I suggested a plain white cover so pure that it would seem to place it in the context of the most esoteric art publications. To further this ambiguity, I took it more into the little press field by individually numbering each cover.”

Paul McCartney and Hamilton worked closely together to design both the cover of the album and a poster insert slipped into the double-disc set.  The poster insert was where Hamilton spent the majority of his design time. He selected a sampling of personal photos from the Beatles and created a collage only slightly more controlled in feel than if the photos were to be strewn across a tabletop. He explains his process: “Because the sheet was folded three times to bring it to the square shape for insertion into the album, the composition was interestingly complicated by the need to consider it as a series of subsidiary compositions. The top right and left hand square are front and back of the folder and had to stand independently as well as be a double spread together.”