DESIGN OF

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”In London towards the end of 1976,the time when revolution, punk, and graphic design all came into play. Punk had already become established and was a defined fashion. It was an aesthetic response to the social injustice, political disasters, and economic dis-parity during the 1970’s. The graphic design style that came out of this was expressed mainly through zines, xeroxed and collaged advertisements and flyers, and record sleeves. This “punk explosion” started with the Sex Pistols. It was short lived, chaotic, and frenetic. Earlier in the year of 1976, Malcolm McClaren came into contact with Jamie Reid with a request to create some artwork for The Sex Pistols (a new band McClar-en had started managing). Together, they designed the Sex Pistols’ tour posters, flyers, record sleeves, record advertisements, concert pamphlets, t-shirts, stickers, and badges. They took pieces of the present and the future and ripped them apart, cut pieces up, and put them together. In their work they focused highly on collage. This period of time was revolutionary not just socially but aesthetically as well.

Punk was like an exor-cism which cleared up a lot of the shit that was left over from the Sixties. Punk was about spontaneity and it also carried with it a really vicious sense of humour. - Jamie Reid

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Sex Pistols: God Save The Queen (1977), size 30” x 41”

Artist Jamie Reid was born in 1947 and grew up in London. In the late 1960’s, Reid met fellow student and soon to be manager of the Sex Pistols, Malcom McClaren. In the mid 1970’s, McClaren became the manager of the Sex Pistols and recruit-ed Reid to help provide and produce the artwork for the band. Reid’s work that he produced for the Sex Pistols became of the biggest inspirations and helped form and define the English punk scene. Reid designed artwork for the Sex Pistols’ debut studio album, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols. Reid not only produced the cover art for the song “Anarchy in the U.K.,” which was a torn and tattered Union Jack flag with safety pins clipped to it, but also co-wrote the lyrics to this popular song “other Reid-made Pistols art, including a picture of the Queen with a safety pin through her lip, became defining symbols of the punk rock era, and the Sex Pistols in particular.” The saftey-pin thus became a significant symbol; stuck together but hanging apart; repaired and impaired.

There have always been two sides to my work - the esoteric and the political.

Sex Pistols: God Save The Queen Sticker (1977), size 5 1/2” x 4”

- Jaime Reid

”Sex Pistols: God Save The Queen (1977), size 30” x 41”

Sex Pistols: Fuck Forever (1986), size 40” x 27”

Sex Pistols: God Save The Queen Sticker (1977), size 5 1/2” x 4”

Crass, The Feeding of the 5000 LP (1978)

Crass Flyer (1978) Flyer was for a film CO-OP

Anthem-Soldier (1979) 34cm x 27cmMargarine the Leaderine

She concentrated her highly developed paint-ing skills on photorealism; creating some of the most disturbing and acclaimed images of the time. Her work is generally accepted as having been seminal to the iconography of the Punk generation.- Richie Unterberger

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“Vaucher’s upbringing in the bleak post-w

ar rationing and poverty o

f working-class e

ast

London informed her enduring DIY aesthetic towards art. C

reating something from nothing

is wholly i

ntrinsic to her art –

almost as a philosophy or ra

ison d’être. “It’s a

rt in itse

lf,”

she says. “And you could say th

at relates to the war – I

was born a month after it ended.

It was sti

ll wartim

e – there was sti

ll shortage. M

y father was an absolute genius at making

something from nothing. Like me, he would pick

stuff up off the stre

et. I still d

o, and use

it.” Gee Vaucher was born immediately a

fter WWII in

London. Growing up, she had al-

ways been inspired by her mother and father who hand-made a lot of the stuff th

ey used.

Her mother would knit and fix clothing while her father would make all so

rts of toys a

nd

even a mini put course in their backya

rd completely by hand. Th

is has Vaucher inspired to

do a lot od DIY projects throughout her life

. During the 1970’s and 1980’s, G

ee Vauch-

er’s work (s

uch as record sleeves and newsletters) w

ith Anarcho-punk band Crasswas

focused on ‘protest art’. I

n the past, she had always u

sed her artwork as a tool for ch

ange

in society. In her paintings and collages, y

ou can see her expression of anarcho-pacifist

and feminist views. “S

he used her surrealist i

nfluenced collage style and stencil le

ttering

to incite social change, exposing the ills

of civil so

ciety with frank and often disturbing

imagery.” (1) Her work b

ecame some of the most iconic p

unk art in it’s

time.

For me, typography is a triangular relationship between de-

sign idea, typographic elements, and printing technique.

In the year 1941 in Germany, Wolfgang Weingart

was born. In 1958, Weingart enrolled in a two-year

course for art and design at the Merz Academy in

Stuttgart. After graduating, he was granted a tough

but rewarding apprenticeship as a typesetter at Ruwe

Printing in Stuttgart. It was there that he met house

designer Karl-August Hanke, a former student at the

Basel School of Design. Hanke became a mentor to

Weingart and introduced him to design being that

was being done outside of Germany, particularly in

Switzerland, where Ruder and other designers such

as Armin Hofmann and Karl Gerstner were making

work that would come to be referred to as Internation-

al Style. In 1964, Weingart attended the Basel School

of Design. In 1968 Armin Hofmann made the move

to have Weingart teach the typography course for ad-

vanced graphic-design program for postgraduate pro-

fessionals at the Basel School of Design. In his class,

he explored new typography methods that influenced

much of the New Wave or Swiss Punk. This style was

similar to all of the other text styles happening in art

at the same time such as the punk graphics appearing

on sleeves and flyers. The text didn’t have any rules,

designers were no longer “slaves” to text.

WOLFGANG WEINGART

“”

- Wolfgang Weingart

”

Kunstkredit (1978), 35” x 50” Das Schweizer Plakat (1983), 47 1/4” x 33 1/8” UCLA Extension (2000), 35” x 50”

Kunstkredit (1976), Worldformat poster for Kunsthalle Basel 35” x 50” Schreibkunst (1981), 35.5” x 50.2” Jewelry 1976 (1975) a special exhibition at the Mustermesse Basel

Kunstkredit (1977), 35” x 50” The 20th Century (1984), 35.5” x 50.2” Typographic Process, Nr 4. Typographic Signs (1971-1972), 34 1/2 x 24 1/4”

By definition, it stands for do-it-yourself. This was a huge part of the punk scene that started emerging in the mid to late 1970’s. As more and more punk music was born into the scene, more and more zines were produced. A zine is a noncommercial and often hand-made publication that is devoted to a single matter. Zines began to emerge in the years 1976-1979 in Britian. “Punk fanzines attempt-ed to recreate the same buzz visually — an ethos encapsulated by the Sex Pistols who famously remarked in the New Musical Express ‘ We’re not into music … we’re into chaos .’” These zines adopted DIY; an independent approach that these musicians had come to adopt. These zines offered free space to voice out opinions and developing ideas on certain subjects mostly involving social and political frustrations. These zines were a visual space with formal design rules and visual expectations. “One member of the com-munity reflects ‘our fanzines were always clumsy, unprofessional, ungrammatical, where design was due to inadequacy rather than risk .’” One of the first punk fanzines that was produced was Mark Perry’s Sniffin’ Glue. This zine was said to be a true DIY production. Other well-known zines that followed after were Panache, Ripped & Torn, and Chainsaw. “At the outset punk graphics were also immediate and required, like punk music, little skill to produce in the conventional sense; they were characterized by the emergence of a range of low-tech fanzines such as Sniffin Glue, which began pub-lication in 1976. Crudely designed pages, often with handwritten, graffiti-like insertions and typographic errors, as well as letters torn out from other sources, characterized the style.” A lot of the material used to communicate was branched off of DIY. People made DIY pamphlets, flyers, record sleeves, patches, badges, symblols, etc. Characteristics used in these productions were hand-rendered and stenciled typefaces, ransom-note typography, photocopied imagery that were often borrowed from newspaper stories of the day. The publications and art produced in this time period showed such re-sistance that was defined by the graphic language which emerged from punk’s DIY and also from the use of symbols, photographic images, typefaces and the way these characteristics were laid out. It is the graphic language that differentiated these publications and artwork from the mainstream and helped define and symbolize the punk rock era.

WHAT IS DIY?

Sniffin’ Glue: Issue 3 (1976), 8.5” x 11”

Black Flag, Circle Jerks, Stains, and Descendents Flyer (1980)

Works Cited

Brophy, Philip. “Post Punk Graphics.” Restuff. Philip Brophy, 1990. Web. 08 Apr. 2013.

Burrows, Alex. “Something From Nothing: The Crass Art Of Gee Vaucher.” The Quietus. The Quietus, 2 Dec. 2012. Web. 08 Apr. 2013.

Burton, Philip. “Wolfgang Weingart.” AIGA. AIGA, 2013. Web. 10 Apr. 2013.

“Crass at the Film CO-OP Live Poster.” Crasshistory.wordpress.com. Wordpress, 7 July 2011. Web. 08 Apr. 2013.

“Jamie Reid Biography.” Bio.com. A&E Networks Television, n.d. Web. 08 Apr. 2013.

Triggs, Teal. “Scissors and Glue: Punk Fanzines and the Creation of a DIY Aesthetic.” Journal of Design History 19.1 (2006): 69-83. Web. 8 Apr. 2013.

WHAT IS DIY?

Designed by Miekala Cangelosi

Printed and bound by Miekala Cangelosi

Composed in Futura Book, Futura Book Oblique, Futura Light, and Futura Light Oblique, typefaces designed by Paul Renner in 1927