Looking far younger than he should ... designer Peter Savile. Photograph: Paul Simpson/MEN  It's early afternoon when Peter Saville - legend of graphic design - answers the door of his London studio, dressed in a hotel bathrobe and matching towel. "Oh," he says, commendably unfazed, "I didn't expect you to be on time." Though it is you who are visiting him, somehow it is Saville who has made an entrance. After a couple of hours in his company, one begins to suspect that, like his work, there is little about meeting Peter Saville in person that he has not, at some stage, considered in advance.  Born in Manchester, Saville graduated from art college in 1978 and became a founding partner in Factory Records. In Michael Winterbottom's movie 24 Hour Party People it is Saville's character that arrives with the posters for Factory's first gig on the evening it takes place. Through his work with Joy Division and New Order he not only applied a design philosophy to record sleeves that (as he will explain) altered the whole business of music packaging, but also contributed significantly to the enigma of the bands themselves. He would go on to design for a huge range of artists from Pulp to Paul McCartney. His clients outside the record business have included Givenchy, EMI and Alexander McQueen. While few would deny his stature and influence as a designer, there are many who would attest that perfectionist-iconoclast approach to pretty much everything (and a flexible attitude to deadlines, if you believe Factory's Tony Wilson) have made him a commercial misfit. None of which is news to Peter Saville.  "I don't do much commercial work now," he says. "I do as little as possible - not deliberately, there's just very little that I feel like doing, and I don't put myself out and about in a position to get it. The cost of that is living on a mattress in the studio but I'm happier doing that ... I'm not that at ease with the commercial communications seduction machine that is going on today. I'm not that interested in a mercenary steering of people toward things that I, myself, don't have much regard for. Consequently there isn't an enormous place for me in the world of general design."  The most striking benefit of this idealistic retreat from the rigours of commerce is that, dressed and armed with a French cigarette, he looks about 15 years younger than he ought to. He is 50 this year and you'd think he hadn't missed a night's sleep in his life - which given his list of collaborators seems unlikely. Almost as unlikely as the reason for our meeting, which is based around his work for Sony's PSP console. An odd hook-up for a man famous among his peers for the fact that he has never been able to use a computer.  "Some days it frustrates me," he admits. "I can't access my email on my own. Sam [his assistant] prints it out and puts in my desk. I am absolutely not interested at all in jumping around like a play ball to people's emails. It's appalling, there's a terrible culture around that now."  The "terrible culture" of being beholden to clients was, he explains, one of the things that caused him to beat a conscious retreat from the frontlines of the industry. But his disdain for modern business goes further than that.  "The consumer is being manipulated as an addict," reckons Saville. "To me, pop culture's gone from being acid to crack. When people took acid in the 1970s it was likely to be a mind-expanding slightly dangerous thing but they came away from it thinking, 'Well I never saw it like that before.' As opposed to crack, which will drain everything you've got until you're dead. And there's a big difference between introducing someone to acid 25 years ago and dealing them some crack today, and I don't like being part of that system."  Happily, Sony's project, which involves placing giant Saville-designed cut-out guitars around London for people to "interact" with, struck him as acceptable. "There's no obligation to buy anything," he explains. "The electric guitar seemed perfect, a universal medium of pop culture. When you're 12 or 13 and you pick up an electric guitar, it's a bit big, it makes you feel like a kid, feeling grown up. I thought, 'That's the way these games operate.' You've got grown-ups feeling young and youngsters feeling grown up. Electric guitar, same process. That was it."  He may cast himself as a fugitive from commerce and prefer to occupy his time with loftier matters than sleeve design (he has been "creative director" of the city of Manchester for the past year) but Saville is not above casting his eye over some recent album sleeves. With the major releases of the year so far gathered on his desk before him he scans over their artwork with a knowing look.  "I was interested in things being done better throughout," he explains as he dismantles the lavish packaging from the recent Kraftwerk album. "Mission accomplished!" he announces. "An aesthetically coherent sensibility has been disseminated down through the whole business of distributing pop." He opens another CD. "They'll all be the same. It is a mission accomplished. A lot of people don't notice. They don't notice that their train tickets look better, but they do. If I go into a record store now and look across the rack, Malcolm [Garret - his colleague and collaborator] and I achieved what we set out to achieve. It's all better, around 75% better."  How much credit do you take for that?  "All of it," he says without hesitation. "A lot of it. Not for doing anything particularly, just for bothering ..."  One sleeve that does spark his interest though is Coldplay's X&Y. "Well, it's just Blue Monday," he says, placing his original alongside. "But the difference is total, you almost can't discuss it. We either have a minute on it or a month on it." The minute perhaps? "That was a cult release," he points at Blue Monday. "Unadvertised, unplayable on the radio, by a small group of people in Manchester who had no notion whatsoever of any commercial viability ... it became the biggest selling 12-inch ever and was played on the radio. But nobody cared. The key thing was we didn't care."  He produces the first Factory poster. "This poster, to 99.9% of people in Manchester it didn't mean anything. But that was fine to me because 99.9% of people weren't interested in going to the gig so there was no point in talking to them. It's difficult to compare, and we can propose a bunch of reasons why. The whole Joy Division/New Order thing is one of the last true stories in pop, that's why." He gestures vaguely at the new releases. "This is entertainment, all of it. The thing that unknowingly protected Joy Division and New Order was that they never signed a record deal. If you go up and talk to Bernard Sumner now he doesn't agree. I heard him turn to Tony Wilson one day in 1992 and say, 'You've ruined my fucking career,' but there's another hour-long conversation." And when Peter Saville says that, you can be certain that he means every minute of it.  · Peter Saville's CutOut guitars will appear around London from Thu 21-August 1
With his work for Factory Records, Peter Saville changed the way we look at record covers. These days he's sleeping in his studio and can't work his computer. Michael Holden met him.