Mark Farrow is a graphic designer currently residing in London. He worked with Paul West and Rob Petrie at (3) and around 1995 founded his own company, Farrow Design.
He worked with Pet Shop Boys since their beginnings and designed most of their record sleeves, tour merchandise and books, giving them a unique, elegant style, perfectly matching the class of Pet Shop Boys’ music. As he himself stated:
Somebody has to have an idea of what is going on marketing wise, from the point of view of selling it and how the public will perceive it, and that’s kind of what we do. We gather all of the elements that come in together and make them into a cohesive campaign.
It was Mark Farrow who created the innovative, eye-catching and award-winning designs for 1989’s Introspective, 1990’s Behaviour, 1995’s Alternative, 1997’s Somewhere and fan-club release It doesn’t often snow at Christmas. Interestingly enough, the record packaging Pet Shop Boys are probably most known from—1993’s Very orange plastic case—wasn’t created by Mark Farrow, but Pentagram design bureau.
Farrow’s company also created designs for William Orbit, Lightning Seeds, Spiritualized, Manic Street Preachers, Orbital, Cream, M People and most of late Kylie Minogue’s books and records, including her 2000’s album Light years and corresponding singles.
Going back to Pet Shop Boys area, the designs created by Farrow won several awards, including “best single package design” for Somewhere and Yesterday, when I was mad singles at the British Design & Art Direction Awards in London in 1997 and 1994, respectively. Limited edition of Alternative was nominated for best packaging at 1994’s Grammy’s Awards.
Additionally, it was Mark Farrow who contacted Pet Shop Boys with Electronic in 1989, which led to their collaboration.
At this point, though, Pet Shop Boys and Mark Farrow parted ways—last three albums with Pet Shop Boys’s involvement (Closer to heaven, Release, Disco 3 and PopArt), as well as for a couple of recent singles and other memorabilia have been designed by other people. The last collaboration with Farrow have been the 2006’s album Fundamental, and both singles from album I'm With Stupid and Minimal.

The book Sampler, written by Lawrence King, also introduced Mark Farrow and his works:

...in due course the all-pervading pop video – the sine qua non of eighties record companies – came to supplant the album cover as the most important visual platform for the record industry.
Before the end of the decade, another figure emerged who was to make an important contribution to the subject. Mark Farrow’s sleeve designs for the Pet Shop Boys ushered in an era of refinement and minimalism somewhat at odds with the prevailing trends of the time. Farrow was assisted in his pursuit of graphic purity by the Pet Shop Boys themselves, who in common with a new generation of savvy musicians and managers, insisted on clauses in their contracts which gave them control over the design of their sleeves. It is a development that has singlehandedly prevented sleeve design from atrophying, and while it cannot be said to always guarantee brilliant design, it at least allows for distinctive and rebellious sleeve art to bubble to the surface. Although there are numerous examples of fruitful partnerships between designers and musicians – Me Company and Bjork; Stylo Rouge and their early work for Blur – nowhere is this alliance of disciplines better illustrated than in the prolific relationship between Mark Farrow and the Pet Shop Boys.
Farrow remains a potent and influential force in the nineties. His beguiling packaging for Ladies and Gentleman we are Floating in Space by Spiritualised represents a return to the grandiose packaging not seen since the pre-punk era. But Farrow represents only one strand of design thinking in the pluralistic nineties. As we have seen, the new hard line adopted by the record industry stands in marked contrast to their previously sympathetic approach, and as we have also seen, the sleeve designers of the previous three decades operated in an atmosphere of encouragement and acceptance, very different from the conditions that pertain today. Yet if we examine the micro-climate in which intelligent sleeve design currently exists it is clear that it is refusing to die. Despite the loss of the vinyl sleeve, despite the rise of the music video, despite the record companies’ reliance on Spice Girls-type disposability, and despite the uncertainty coursing through the industry, sleeve design remains alive and oddly vibrant.

Born in Baghdad (Iraq) in 1950 and works in London. Zaha Hadid is an architect who consistently pushes the boundaries of architecture and urban design. Her work experiments with new spatial concepts intensifying existing urban landscapes in the pursuit of a visionary aesthetic that encompasses all fields of design, ranging from urban scale to products, interiors, and furniture. Best known for her seminal built works (Cardiff Bay Opera House, The Center for Contemporary Arts in Rome, Vitra Fire Station, LFOne/Landesgartenschau, Bergisel Ski Jump, Lois and Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art, BMW Plant Central Building, Hotel Puerta America [interior], Ordrupgaard Museum Extension, and Phaeno Science Center, her central concerns involve a simultaneous engagement in practice, teaching, and research.
Zaha is responsible for the Pet Sho Boys' stage set an design for Nightlife tour in 1999/00. During the design process of this PSB project, before its final realisation, she released the following statement detailing her architectural concept:'The stage set for the Pet Shop Boys World tour 2000 moves beyond the boundaries of a tradition based on horizontal-vertical dichotomies. Inspired by the diversity of character and variety in size of the stage venues an ever-evolving syntetic landscape emerges which from its compact begining gradually expands and transforms into a catalogue of frozen choreographies complementing the PSB' soundscapes. As the object metamorphosies into a landscape, a dynamic, almost indepent process adds another temporal layer to the concert-narrative itself. The complex geometry and changing transparencies of continuous surfaces in combination with lighting, animations and graphic projections create a three-dimensional visual space that blurs and disorts the boundaries between the audience and performer.'

Samples: Nightlife stage set, Museum of Transport Glasgow, Guangzhou Opera House, Sheik Zayad Bridge, Olympic Aquatic Centre.

Greenhalgh studied at the Royal College of Art, setting up the firm Why Not after graduating. He came to prominence in the early 1990s with his direction of the music video for the Snap! song "Rhythm is a Dancer". Greenhalgh then was hired by the Pet Shop Boys to direct videos for their successful album Very and later its follow-up Bilingual. His work has also included the video for George Michael's song 'Jesus To A Child', several videos for Muse, Placebo, Soundgarden and others.
His videos for Very (Go West, Can You Forgive Her, Liberation, Yesterday...) make extensive and early use of computer animation and blue screen to create environments of geometric shapes and patterns in which the group members Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe are inserted. Lowe said in retrospect that he felt that computer games had a strong appeal to a young audience and that copying their design styles could be successful: "The big game was Sonic The Hedgehog and I liked this game where the audience, when a goal was scored, all started dancing. I was playing computer games a lot, thinking, 'This is what the kids are into…wouldn’t it be great if we became this thing removed from reality and existing in a non-real world?'" Spin magazine described these videos as "routinely rejected" by MTV, a reference to their rock-oriented programming at the time. His clip for the song "Liberation" was later reused in the 2000 animation anthology CyberWorld. He later directed the video of Soundgarden's song 'Black Hole Sun', attracting attention in the United States; in 1995, Spin magazine awarded him a reader's choice award for best video for this.
Describing his approach to music video direction, Greenhalgh said in a 2010 interview that "With anything, it’s the lyrics that are everything. You pray that there are good lyrics in a track because that leads you immediately to what you’re going to do."

Born March 29, 1946 is an American photographer and occasional filmmaker. He is most widely known for his ad campaigns for Calvin Klein, Abercrombie & Fitch and Ralph Lauren.

In 1988, Weber was approached by British pop duo Pet Shop Boys, who were in New York City to work with Liza Minnelli for her album Results. The Pet Shop Boys wanted Weber to do a video for their forthcoming single, "Domino Dancing", from their album Introspective. Weber was interested, but too busy with his current film, a documentary about Chet Baker, to accept.
Two years would pass before another opportunity for such a collaboration would present itself. By 1990, Pet Shop Boys had a new album, Behaviour, and were releasing "Being Boring" as a single. Weber took the project and directed a video, which would be both acclaimed and controversial. Weber's idea was to film a wild party with a very diverse group of people. Filmed in one day by two film crews in a house on Long Island, it was the most expensive Pet Shop Boys video at the time, costing roughly $225,000. Though there was no sexual content, a brief glimpse of male buttocks at the beginning was enough to prevent the video from being played on MTV in the USA.
However, the Pet Shop Boys enjoyed the video immensely, and worked with Weber again in 1996, this time for a video for "Se a vida é", a song from their latin-influenced album Bilingual. This project was shot at Wet 'n' Wild, a water park near Orlando, Florida.
Another six years later, in 2002, Weber again directed a Pet Shop Boys video, for the song "I Get Along" from the album Release. Weber's concept was to film one of his photo shoots on location at his own Little Bear studio in New York City. The video has a documentary feel, showing the models, as well as the Pet Shop Boys themselves, eating lunch and getting ready before the shoot. The DVD version of the video includes a short film afterward featuring the song "E-mail", which was also Weber's idea.

Samples: Being Boring video, Se A Vida E video, I Get Along/E-mail video, unknown photo, Pirelli Calendar 03.

Brothers Andrew and Stuart Douglas are photographers and directors who work together photographing famous people (such as writer Gabriel Garcia Márquez and composer Michael Nyman) and directing short advertisement movies. Their photographs appeared on various sleeves, including Pet Shop Boys’ Being boring (which was a one-off collaboration), Michael Brook’s Cobalt Blue and The Concise King Crimson’s Sleepless, among others. Douglas Brothers’ distinctive, natural style gained them high critical acclaim and places in best photographic galleries.

Derek Jarman (1942-1994) was an English film director, stage designer, diarist, artist, gardener and author. Jarman's first films were experimental Super 8mm shorts, a form he never entirely abandoned, and later developed further in his films Imagining October (1984), The Angelic Conversation (1985), The Last of England (1987) and The Garden (1990) as a parallel to his narrative work. The Garden was entered into the 17th Moscow International Film Festival. The Angelic Conversation featured Toby Mott and other members of the Grey Organisation, a radical artist collective. Jarman made a side income by directing music videos for various artists, including Marianne Faithfull, the Smiths and the Pet Shop Boys (Rent, It's a Sin). Jarman also directed the 1989 tour by the UK duo Pet Shop Boys. By pop concert standards this was a highly theatrical event with costume and specially shot films accompanying the individual songs. Jarman was the stage director of Sylvano Bussotti's opera L'Ispirazione, first staged in Florence in 1988.