
Pop Culture Pulsar: Origin Story of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures Album Cover - mxfh
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/sa-visual/2015/02/18/pop-culture-pulsar-origin-story-of-joy-divisions-unknown-pleasures-album-cover-video/
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andy_wrote
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](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.

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mrspeaker
"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.

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santaclaus
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.

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huxley
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/](http://asiwyfab.de/2013/02/04/random-music-fact-30/)

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gdubs
Interestingly they came out in the same year -- US release of the film was
only a month before the album. (Peter Saville probably would have caught the
movie in the UK though, which wouldn't have been for another six months.)

~~~
coroxout
Although the computer-generated art was done in the UK, at Atlas Labs (now
part of Rutherford Appleton). [http://www.chilton-
computing.org.uk/acl/applications/animati...](http://www.chilton-
computing.org.uk/acl/applications/animation/p014.htm)

(Not that I think there's any realistic chance Saville saw the art before
release.)

