Client: Lake

Album Packaging for Reunited Rock Band Lake

Paula Scher redesigned the same band’s cover 50 years later.

Pentagram partner Paula Scher designed the cover for 'Four,' the comeback album by the German-British rock band Lake, fifty years after creating their original debut artwork. Collaborating again with illustrator James McMullan, the new design continues the band’s playful visual tradition with a fresh, witty watercolor motif featuring a frog.

Insights

The main story is the full-circle design: Paula Scher created Lake’s 1976 debut cover, then returned 50 years later to design the comeback album, 'Four,' with the same illustrator, James McMullan.
The new packaging continues Lake's visual language, using a frog painted by James McMullan to extend the band's long-running flood-and-water imagery across their record sleeves.
Lake’s album sequence matters to the concept: 'Four' follows *Lake* (1976), *Lake II* (1978), *Paradise Island* (1979), and *Ouch!* (1980), turning the cover into a continuation of the band’s visual history.
Paula Scher is now a Pentagram partner, but the original 1976 artwork predates her Pentagram tenure; that makes the reunion feel less like a revival campaign and more like a rare long-gap collaboration.
The comeback had a real-world payoff: 'Four' entered the official German album charts at #49, which the band’s manager described as “not too bad for a comeback after all those years!”