Under the Covers: The Mysterious Origin Story of Kraftwerk’s Iconic Autobahn Motorway Graphics
Source: AIGA Eye on Design | Jeremy Allen
The cover art of Autobahn has become one of Kraftwerk’s most recognizable motifs, but the famous white-on-blue convergence lines where merely an afterthought as the first edition rolled into production. Those iconic parallel stripes didn’t even appear on the original 1974 artwork by Emil Schult, although they were added to the sleeve in sticker form (which is why, if you search for the vinyl on Discogs, you will find some versions with, and some without).
Schult entered Kraftwerk’s orbit when the seminal German technolords were still a duo finding their way, designing the sleeve for the still largely experimental and flute-heavy Ralf & Florian. His role within the organization was as a kind of conceptual auxiliary man, playing violin, writing lyrics (“Wir fahren, fahren, fahren auf der Autobahn…”) and, as a visual artist, helping to create an aesthetic for the band that would take time to foment. He was a star pupil of the legendary German Fluxus artist Joseph Beuys, and his art theorizing helped consolidate the direction Kraftwerk founders Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider were moving in anyway. Hütter described him as a “medium”; Wolfgang Flür later said he was the band’s “guru.”