I called up the 58-year-old designer at his studio near London, where in addition to teaching graphic design to university students, he continues to create beautiful visuals for bands. We chatted about his work, his enduring love of music, and why he still considers himself a punk at heart.

T. COLE RACHEL: Do people seek you out a lot to talk about your work?

VAUGHAN OLIVER: I wouldn’t say a lot, but yeah. What’s interesting is that people are still interested. I’m flattered that there’s still a respect for the work that we were doing way back then.

RACHEL: I’m a record collector, and I probably own more of your work than any other visual artist.

OLIVER: And why is that? Was it because of the music?

RACHEL: Mostly, but the 4AD records were always so beautiful.

OLIVER: The music was fantastic, but then there’s the connection with the visuals as well …

RACHEL: I came of age at a time when people still bought lots of physical records, most of them on vinyl. So I had that relationship of going to a record store and looking at the packaging, and that was a big part of why I purchased a lot of the music I did.

OLIVER: Did you sometimes go for stuff where you hadn’t heard the music?

RACHEL: Oh yeah. I’ve bought tons of records based on the album artwork. I grew up on a farm and we didn’t really have cable television or college radio. I subscribed to music magazines, and that’s how I found out about bands. The nearest record store was an hour away, and I would go there maybe once a month when I was a teenager.

OLIVER: Did you meet like minds there? It was a social thing as well?

RACHEL: It was sort of like if you saw someone wearing a Siouxsie & the Banshees T-shirt, it connected you with them. That’s how you knew they were part of your tribe. It was the same with records. If you saw a new record out on 4AD, you’d buy it based on the knowledge that if they were putting it out, you’d probably like it.

OLIVER: That was the idea. This was kind of branding before branding—and I generally don’t use the word branding—but it was creating a vibe that made you trust in something. It was amazing because we were doing the Mystery of the Bulgarian Voices records, a Colourbox album, a Pixies album—it was actually quite broad, but somehow it all made sense on the label.

RACHEL: How did your relationship with 4AD begin? You were quite young, right?

OLIVER: Yeah. Somebody introduced me to Ivo about six months after he’d started 4AD, and we just got on. We used to bump into each other at gigs. So there was a kind of empathy, a common goal for what we wanted to do. I was just, “Oh give me a job, mate. You need an identity.” It was a very natural thing. There was no manifesto to it, but the idea behind the whole 4AD thing was to create something with a logo on it. “Oh, it’s the Cocteau Twins with the 4AD thing on the back? What’s this fucking Bulgarian Voices? What’s this fucking Wolfgang Press? I guess I’ll give it a shot.” I was only 20 years old. I was always a bit wary of putting an identity on the label itself, but I wanted individual identities for the bands that were consistent. Then, with time, you would see a thread start to appear. There was a unity, but without a corporate branding stamp on it. It was very fluid. Eventually, it became an emotional response that people had with the work. Thirty years later, I’m talking to students who call it “emotional branding”—how people become emotionally involved in what we were doing. I’ve got clients who ask, “How can we have that now?” I say, “We don’t have that now. It builds with time; it also builds with the quality of the product.” So I guess what I’m saying is, I was in love with the music, I was inspired by it. And Ivo, who was running the company, said, “Go for it.” The bands always had a say as well. Nothing was impressed on them. I always thought it was about really digging into the music and expressing the music as a visual.