Opinion: David King, who died in May at the age of 73, secured a place in British design history with album covers for The Who and Jimi Hendrix, the design of the Sunday Times Magazine, and his logo for the Anti-Nazi League. But his legacy is far richer for anyone interested in the political power of the media, says Owen Hatherley.

Before settling down to write about the graphic designer David King, who died last month, I spread out a few of the books I have that he designed across my table. Most of them are large, glossy photographic albums, roughly the format of the typical photography monograph.
The style of these is consistent, from the mid-1980s up to the mid-2010s. Each has bold, striking sans serifs announcing the title, placed in a box at the centre of the cover, with a colour scheme ? red, black, yellow ? that would have been arrived at in an era when colour printing was prohibitively expensive, but the dash of red provided by four-colour printing gave drama to the inky page. One of David King's first designs was the cover of Jimi Hendrix's Axis: Bold as Love and Electric Ladyland album. It is an example of his use of Modernist layouts and typography informed by the Constructivist avant-garde of the 1920s
The look was one thing ? hardly any British designers have had a style so instantly recognisable ? but the contents, especially where the inside had been designed along with the cover, were the point. King used Modernist layouts and typography informed by (but...