Black Sabbath – Paranoid album art

Published July 26, 2025

Paranoid is the second studio album by Black Sabbath. It was released on 18 September 1970, just seven months after their self-titled debut, and contains several of the band’s best-known songs, including “War Pigs”, “Iron Man”, and – a last-minute addition – the titular “Paranoid”.

As with the first album, the design and photography again was the work of Keith Macmillan a.k.a. Keef. Assuming the album’s title was to be War Pigs, he dressed his assistant and model Roger Brown with a sword, a shield, and a pig mask (though the shots eventually used didn’t feature the mask).

From Kory Grow’s 2020 interview with Macmillan:

The “Paranoid” single came out in July and quickly became a hit, and Warner Bros., the band’s U.S. label, decided it was a better album title than War Pigs and requested that the band change it. Ozzy Osbourne remembers seeing sleeves printed up that said War Pigs on the front with the image of Brown, and was horrified when the title was changed to Paranoid.

“You look at the photo and go, ‘What’s fucking paranoid about that?’ ” Osbourne has said. “It’s two guys with shields and swords and pink leotards.”

Sandy Field, a fellow student of Keef’s at the Royal College of Art, took care of the typography. He used Black Casual, a phototype adaptation of Lettre Coupé. This alphabet of crude cut-out capitals was originally created by Swiss designer Walter Haettenschweiler and reproduced in the second volume of the Lettera alphabet source books from 1961.

See the Blog post.

[More info on Discogs]

Detail

Gatefold from a 1970 German pressing. Track names and credits are set in Times New Roman, just like in the original. The run-times – which are absent in the UK release – were added in a Garamond, alongside the small print in Univers and Helvetica.

Back cover

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