
The Story of Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures Album Cover (2015) - crawdog
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/sa-visual/pop-culture-pulsar-origin-story-of-joy-division-s-unknown-pleasures-album-cover-video/
======
Neil44
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](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.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
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.

~~~
Doctor_Fegg
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...](https://fineartmultiple.com/buy-art/peter-saville-monarch-of-
the-glen/) ...)

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.

------
mkl
4 years ago there was a similar story on HN:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5728124](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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5729268)
e.g. [http://imgur.com/PtkkESv](http://imgur.com/PtkkESv)

~~~
B1FF_PSUVM
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...](https://adamcap.com/2011/04/12/my-number-1-spring-cleaning-
tip/)

------
theoh
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...](http://www.mountaincartography.org/mt_hood/pdfs/kennelly2.pdf)

Original paper by Tanaka
[https://www.jstor.org/stable/1785198](https://www.jstor.org/stable/1785198)

------
ramparrt
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...

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

------
tapia
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.

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

------
raldu
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."

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

------
badcede
[http://www.deathdollsnyc.com/product/depeche-mode-boys-
don-t...](http://www.deathdollsnyc.com/product/depeche-mode-boys-don-t-cry-
division-tee)

~~~
kagamine
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.

~~~
panzerklein
[http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_-qF6CbJo2vY/TQlmBXyC8JI/AAAAAAAAK4...](http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_-qF6CbJo2vY/TQlmBXyC8JI/AAAAAAAAK4U/srrQ0kmkZlQ/s1600/how%2Bto%2Bpiss%2Boff%2Bnerds.jpg)

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

~~~
ams6110
Never heard of Joy Division nor seen this album cover before.

~~~
bobzibub
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.

~~~
erikpukinskis
> 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.

------
pdkl95
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...](http://www.audiovisualizers.com/toolshak/vidsynth/ruttetra/ruttetra.htm)

Minimalist example of the effect:
[https://imgur.com/E5tfUuQ](https://imgur.com/E5tfUuQ)

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

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

[http://nerdyembeddedcomputers.review/hands-on-tensorboard-
te...](http://nerdyembeddedcomputers.review/hands-on-tensorboard-tensorflow-
dev-summit-2017/)

------
abe_duarte
Great album, Joy division is a legendary band.

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

------
zeristor
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...](http://www.animalsyeahyeah.com/mens-c7/unknown-pleasures-cats-t-
shirt-p744)

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

[https://www.threadless.com/product/5040/Furr_Division/style,...](https://www.threadless.com/product/5040/Furr_Division/style,design)

~~~
chiph
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.

