Tag Archives: Punk Graphics

Design and Innovation

Eye On Design: Unknown Pleasures Album Cover Art

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Unknown Pleasures Cover Art

Photo By Gail

This poster by Peter Savile, who first came to prominence for his designs for Factory Records, was issued to promote Joy Division’s 1979 debut album, Unknown Pleasures.  Band member Bernard Sumner found the image, a rendering of successive waves emitted by a pulsar, in an astronomy textbook.  Saville reversed the image from black-on-white to white-on-black, conjuring the darker atmospherics of the album’s sound. The Cover Art design has attained an iconic status, particularly of late, going so far as to spawn the term “joyplot,“ which refers to a method of data visualization that involves the layering of successive and comparative histograms.

Photographed as Part of the Exhibit, Too Fast To Live Too Young to Die: Punk Graphics at the Museum of Arts and Design in NYC.

Music, Pop Culture

Steven Kasher Gallery Presents Rude And Reckless: Punk/Post-Punk Graphics, 1976-82

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Killing Joke, Gang of Four, Bauhaus, Et Al (This Photo by Geoffrey Dicker)

Walking into the Steven Kasher Gallery last night for the opening reception of Rude And Reckless was very much like flashing back to my teenage bedroom, whose walls were plastered floor to ceiling with Punk Rock posters, show flyers, stickers and album cover art until I moved out of my parents house to go to college. Punk Rock – at a time when Punk Rock was really something vital and alive – was everything to me at that time, and I was an avid collector of 7” Punk singles (which I’d pick up by the dozens at Zed Records in Long Beach, California) and punk/new wave badges. A lot of what I collected, and probably still have, seems to have been magically curated into this amazing collection of memorabilia that is sure to delight anyone who has fond memories of the British, New York or LA/Orange County punk scenes in the late ‘70s to early ‘80s. Good times. Continue reading Steven Kasher Gallery Presents Rude And Reckless: Punk/Post-Punk Graphics, 1976-82 →