Pop Culture Pulsar: Origin Story of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures Album Cover

I'm a child of the CD era, and on my (CD) copy of this album, the pulsar pattern fills most of the cover. In college, I came across an LP copy, and I was struck by the difference: the pulsar pattern occupies a much smaller space in the center, with much more of the cover consisting of the black background. The Wikipedia page illustrates it well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unknown_Pleasures (You can also see the LP version at the start of the video in the article, around 0:18).

This is a cool example of how the size of the artistic canvas dictates what you can do (designers, is there a term for this?). I like this album cover because it illustrates the sound of the album well: power filtered through haunting, ethereal music. On the LP cover the figure is probably about the same size as on the CD cover, so it's just as distinguishable. But the predominance of the ground makes it feels starker and lonelier. The trouble with a CD cover-sized canvas is that if you shrink the figure proportionately, it just becomes hard to see.

This illustration has been reproduced on shirts and tote bags and other larger-canvas media. I kind of wish those who did so would take advantage and scale it back down.

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

Proving conclusively that Joy Division were 1337.

Joy Division always kind of blew my mind. A band essentially defines post-punk, then their frontman commits suicide, and they go on to form New Order. Now, every electronic dance set in the world has to include Blue Monday -- quite a versatile bunch.

I remember wondering if the Joy Division album cover was related to one of the computer displays shown in the movie Alien. Here's an image of the two side by side (scroll down a bit):

http://asiwyfab.de/2013/02/04/random-music-fact-30/