OUGD401 - ‘Fucked up and Photocopied’ by Bryan Ray Turcotte and Christopher T. Miller

OUGD401 - ‘Fucked up and Photocopied’ by Bryan Ray Turcotte and Christopher T. Miller

This book catalogues and informs about a great number of D.I.Y punk promotional designs from the 70’s/80’s including flyers, posters and album artwork. 

The punk scene came about from a younger generation of working class men and women who wanted their voices to be heard and used music to do so. Their music was simple yet raw, often using 3 chords for songs and straightforward rhythms and melodies. The vocals were loud and boisterous, with the lyrics mostly covering social and political issues. These sentiments were echoed in the promotion and visual style of the punk scene; kids who wanted to be involved but couldn’t play instruments would lend their hand to creating posters and album covers using cheap methods such as cut up images and type from newspapers, hand drawn type and embossed labels, all photocopied together into noisy and convoluted yet expressive pieces of design - and the D.I.Y punk style was conceived.

For NME at the time, clearly they had a bigger budget and could afford more sophisticated design in their publications, however the D.I.Y aesthetic became an identity for the punk era and all its fans, so often companies like NME would emulate the D.I.Y style in a more bespoke and refined manner. This can be seen in a lot of their magazines from the 70’s and would be great style to adopt or certainly reference in the Rock and Roll redesigned magazine.