This makes my heart sing. For some time now, Mike Joyce, of Stereotype Design fame, has been working on a personal project designing posters inspired by two of his favorite things — punk rock and Swiss typography. The project, which he calls Swissted (haha) turns up some totally bizarre-but-lovely juxtapositions of grungy gig info set in Berthold Akzidenz-Grotesk Medium. Now, he’s set up an online shop in which to sell his creations, so you too can rejoice in their strangeness. Admittedly, it’s all something of a nerdy designer in-joke, but I suspect people will be into these even if they don’t have the first idea how strange the posters are. I mean, look at them. They’re so cool! Here’s more of the backstory, c/o Mike:
“I grew up going to punk and hardcore shows in the mid-to-late 80’s and was inspired by the flyers used to promote the shows. They were almost always black and white photocopies of some crazy image copied from a newspaper or magazine with the band’s names scrawled across it with a magic marker or, if the designer had the money and time, Letraset. I thought it would be interesting to see the contrasts between the strict and rigid grid systems of the International Typographic style with the no-rules ethos of punk and the underground hardcore movement. The clean and modern geometric designs play well off of some of the more abrasive band names like Dirty Rotten Imbeciles and the Dicks. And sometimes the designs seem to speak to the band’s energy like the poster for 999. It also might be a surprise to some people who aren’t too familiar with punk, to see that some of the designs don’t stray too far from the band’s original image—the Germs are a good example. If you look at the cover of GI, their debut (and only) album released in 1979, you’d never know it was from one of LA’s most notorious punk bands. It looks like it could have been designed by Josef Muller-Brockmann himself.”
![Wait. What year is this? Surely the story, Velvet Underground Sues Warhol Foundation isn’t contemporary? You know, what with the band no longer existing and Andy Warhol being long dead? Not so. Turns out, the group’s founding musicians Lou Reed and John Cale filed a complaint in Manhattan on January 11th, 2012, arguing that Warhol’s foundation infringed the design that adorned their epically brilliant album, The Velvet Underground and Nico “by licensing it to third parties.”
I can’t tell whether the musicians want to free the banana back to the public domain from whence they argue it came, or if they simply want a slice of the banana proceedings. But it certainly raises questions about the provenance, use of graphic imagery and other copyright laws. And while it might seem trivial to some, there are real financial issues at stake here. As the Bloomberg story reports: “Warhol’s copyrighted works have a market value of $120 million and the foundation has earned more than $2.5 million a year licensing rights to those works.”
Much of the argument seems to have been sparked by the decision by the Warhol Foundation to license the banana image for a series of iPhone and iPad cases, sleeves and bags, as reported in the New York Times last year. What was there a fluffy style piece has now become a matter of litigation, surely not the first time we’ll see such action in a newly digitally driven world.
An aside. The screenshot shown here is taken from my own digital copy of the album. Does that infringe someone’s rights? I’m honestly not sure.
[Story via Rob Walker.]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lxoyyqOX791qikpxao1_1280.png)
