The Story of Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures Album Cover (2015) | Hacker News Reader

The Story of Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures Album Cover (2015)

blogs.scientificamerican.com

182 pointscrawdog38 comments

I love what Peter Saville was doing with his art back then, bringing industrial cues into places that both contrasted and chimed so beatully. I love his Power Corruption & Lies cover where he just adds the colour bar, so simple.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power,_Corruption_%26_Lies

If you look at the promo stuff he was doing for Factory Records in the late 70s and 80s it still looks great today.

I think Peter Saville possibly qualifies for the genius label.

If you compare the industry standard sleeve and poster designs of that time with his work for Factory, it's like getting visual communications from another world. (Literally, with the Unknown Pleasures art.)

He completely transformed the industry's approach to imagery - and I suspect that neither Joy Division nor New Order would have been nearly as successful without his iconic covers.

And for a long period, too: the covers for True Faith (1987) and Technique (1989) were still startling in their newness. (If I ever come into serious money I'm buying this: https://fineartmultiple.com/buy-art/peter-saville-monarch-of... ...)

Worth noting that the pulsar image was actually found by Bernard Sumner/Albrecht, Joy Division's guitarist (and later New Order's singer), though of course Saville transformed it from found imagery to iconic sleeve.

He's great. Theres a book you should check out, 'Designed by Peter Saville', it's got a lot of his work from that period.

His work on Tony Wilson's headstone (FAC-501) is pretty fantastic, too.

http://www.anothermag.com/art-photography/2651/peter-saville...

I had a friend who collected Factory Records 12" for the sleeves (music too, but even if we didn't like the music, we got the record). I used to go around the record shops and search with him. Was too broke to do it for myself alone. The album art by Factory was sometimes better than the music on the record.

'Factory Records : The Complete Graphic Album' book, 2006 https://vufind.carli.illinois.edu/all/vf-uiu/Record/8188597

4 years ago there was a similar story on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5728124

And I was bored or something back then and made a Python program that generates random pictures like it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5729268 e.g. http://imgur.com/PtkkESv

I like the next entry, My Number 1 Spring Cleaning Tip

"If you haven’t used it in the past year, get rid of it. [...] chances are you probably won’t use it this year, and the unlikeliness of utility will just compound year after year after year."

https://adamcap.com/2011/04/12/my-number-1-spring-cleaning-t...

It's funny that just five years ago, the book "Unknown Pleasures" (by Peter Hook) used the same image on its cover with the claim that attempts to trace the copyright holder had been unsuccessful. When I saw it in a bookshop it seemed like a kind of dismissal of the scientific origins of the image: it was well known where Peter Saville had got it from, though beyond that perhaps the copyright was a mystery.

As far as appearance goes, a similar-looking technique for shading relief maps was invented by Kitiro Tanaka in the 1930s:

http://www.mountaincartography.org/mt_hood/pdfs/kennelly2.pd...

Original paper by Tanaka https://www.jstor.org/stable/1785198

In the film 500 Days of Summer, Tom (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) wears a shirt with this design on it.

I have a similar shirt and had no idea what the design was. I know Joy Division, I was familiar with songs on the album, but had never actually seen the cover. My postman, a man in his mid-50s called me out one day, asking me if I was a Joy Division fan. I said yes and asked why he would ask that and he just pointed to my shirt. I assume he thinks i'm a tragic hipster now...

Joy Division fans were tragic hipsters before there were hipsters, yo. So, no worries. :)

It is just nice to see how the creator of the image just loved to see his work being used there and did not instantly think about suing the band. Not something you would expect to happen nowadays.

It has also recently inspired a ggplot (R) visualisation: https://github.com/clauswilke/ggjoy

Anyone noticed the 1337 from the article?

> "Successive pulses from the first pulsar discovered, CP 1919, are here superimposed vertically. The pulses occur every 1.337 seconds."

Someone on intergalactic IRC is trying to contact us. 1.337, it's not Pi but it'll have to do for now.

http://www.deathdollsnyc.com/product/depeche-mode-boys-don-t...

Is that deliberately Engrish style? A band name with the album title of a different band (The Cure are known for Boys Don't Cry, not Depeche Mode) with album art from Joy Division. Looking at that I felt my mind collapse in on itself.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_-qF6CbJo2vY/TQlmBXyC8JI/AAAAAAAAK4...

Such an iconic album cover. I know people who knew the cover/design way before they even knew who Joy Division was.

Never heard of Joy Division nor seen this album cover before.

Mind if I ask your age and nationality?

EDIT: Maybe a more interesting question, can you give a couple of examples of your favourite albums/songs/bands?

50, American. I like rock, punk, garage, and some country.

So the punk thing didn't extend to British post-punk?

Growing up in the UK (born 1971) with an interest in an alternative music, Joy Division were just canon.

I'm guessing you're from the Midwest. Maybe from a rural area. No way you've never heard of Joy Division if you lived on the coasts.

Please name some rock and punks bands you liked growing up.

Love Will Tear Us Apart received significant airplay in the US, at least where I grew up in the 80s. Even if you’ve never heard of the band, you might know that one song: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zuuObGsB0No

I became a recent fan after catching a feature film [0] and a documentary [1] about the band. Worth a look and listen.

[0] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0421082/ [1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1097239/

"24 Hour Party People" covers the music scene in Manchester at the time, including Joy Division:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0274309/

It's good fun (apart from the obvious not fun bit) but nowhere as good as Control.

A difficult thing to describe. Joy Division was a product of a man tortured by his internal demons. To me, their music was never really about the usual topics. It was about the a desire for a just (yet unattainable) world given the barbarism of everyday life. If you're fifty, it may be trite idealism but to a teenager in the 1980s who could see the shallowness of it all but could not express it, Joy Division was wonderful. And because of Ian Curtis' suicide, that added to the authenticity and romance of it. Of course suicide is never something to romanticize and is a painful tragedy that leaves family and friends with wounds that will never fully heal. The experience of an adult eventually override the idealism of youth.

Just commenting to say that you worded that very well. I'd have just linked 'New Dawn Fades'

> The experience of an adult eventually override the idealism of youth.

You don't have to override it completely. Some hold onto a bit of both. Things can still happen you wouldn't anticipate.

I always thought it looked like Rutt-Etra synthesis, which often has similar "raster line" effect.

Original hardware (1972) w/ good example of the effect (2nd image down): http://www.audiovisualizers.com/toolshak/vidsynth/ruttetra/r...

Minimalist example of the effect: https://imgur.com/E5tfUuQ

(webgl tool used to make that example): https://airtightinteractive.com/demos/js/ruttetra/

TensorFlow's dashboard TensorBoard has a stacked plot visualisation inspired by this album cover:

http://nerdyembeddedcomputers.review/hands-on-tensorboard-te...

Great album, Joy division is a legendary band.

jim morrison split into two when he passed, one half became ian the other half became ted nugent

This has been reinterpreted with cats, I saw someone wearing this T-shirt in Camden the other day.

http://www.animalsyeahyeah.com/mens-c7/unknown-pleasures-cat...

I have, what I beleive to be a slightly better version of that, from here

https://www.threadless.com/product/5040/Furr_Division/style,...

The design has been "borrowed" by any number of firms. I have an O'Neill (surf gear) shirt with a version of it. And there was a Disney one with Mickey's outline in the waves.

It seems to have entered the under-mind, as being "that design with the lines" and few people know the origin any more.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com