Roger Dean was born in Ashford, Kent, England, on the 31st of August 1944 at 8.30pm. His mother had studied fashion design at Canterbury School of Art before her marriage. His father was an engineer in the British army and he took the option of going abroad, so most of Roger's childhood was spent away from England - in Greece, Cyprus and Hong Kong. He has a brother, Martyn and two sisters, Penny and Phillipa.

Roger and Martyn

The family returned to Britain in 1959 and Roger went to Ashford Grammar School. In 1961 Roger began a three year course in the Industrial Design Department at Canterbury School of Art, leading to a National Diploma of Design. Initially he studied silversmithing and then furniture design. During 1964 Roger made the first designs for the "Sea Urchin Chair".

In 1965 he joined the Royal College of Art Furniture school under Professor David Pye where most of his time was spent on research and preliminary work for the Home for Life . He made the Sea Urchin Chair which was exhibited at the Design Centre in the Haymarket, where it became the focus of media attention for some time.

Roger graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1968 and continued to live and work in London. He designed seating for Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club, produced his first record cover, for a group called Gun, the beginning of an ongoing collaboration between Roger and other musicians.

Whilst designing record covers, Roger was still working on his architectural and furniture projects. Lord Snowden borrowed Roger's "Sea Urchin Chair" to exhibit at a British trade fair in Brussels, the Victoria and Albert Museum acquired the first prototype for their permanent exhibition and the Royal Academy and the Design Centre exhibited it.

In 1970 Roger and his brother Martyn took part in the Daily Telegraph "Design For Living" exhibition at Maples. This project gained national recognition through the press for the work of both Roger and Martyn at a time when they had only just graduated from art college.

In 1971 Roger produced the first Osibisa album cover, which attracted a lot of attention to his work as an album cover designer and late in that same year he designed his first album cover for "Yes".

1975 saw Roger and his brother designing a stage set for "Yes". In America the auditoriums often have seating for as many as twenty thousand people, so the scale of production and the nature of the design are quite different to those of a theatre.

1975 also saw the idea of producing a number of large format fully illustrated books, including, "Views" and "Album cover Album" become a reality. Roger and Martyn became publishers.

"Views" was a portfolio of an already substantial body of work which Roger had produced in the short period of time since graduating from the Royal College of Art in 1968,( seven years). Initially Roger approached a number of publishers with his book, but they rejected it on the grounds that the cost of producing the sort of book that he suggested would be prohibitively expensive and technically difficult to produce.

The book was finally published in collaboration with a print company and although both Roger and his partners found themselves taking a considerable financial risk, it wasn't long before their faith in the book was justified. It went to No. 1 in "The Times" best seller list, stayed there for eleven weeks and went on to sell over a million copies.