When Punk first exploded in the 1970s it looked like youthful rebellion. In actuality it was part of the Postmodernist movement which began as a reaction to the rigid restrictions of Modernism. Its DIY ethos encapsulated the anti-establishment mood of the mid 1970s, a time of political and social turbulence. The former British Empire was dissolving and a new era in British music, fashion and design was beginning.
Taking the stage to articulate the feelings of a dissatisfied generation calling for change were the Sex Pistols, who played their first gig in 1975 at St Martins College of Art. Their outrageous behaviour and contempt for established conventions announced the beginning of Punk. The DIY ethos and uncontrolled, home made style was revolutionary at the time and launched a new era in British music, fashion and design.
Typesetters, aside from being expensive in a poor economy, also situated text on a rigid grid. In order to get around these limitations and restrictions, punk imagery took to a variety of methods to showcase their simple, dirty and aggressive messages. This collage style suggested a ripping up and starting again. The style takes a commercial image and repurposes it for revolutionary purposes. With punk’s general disdain for all things conventional the freedom this hand created format allowed punk style to break out of the typographic grid that was limiting to most designers at the time when text was regularly formatted in this standardized method.
The ransom note style fit into the larger scheme of collage in the punk imagery. This reappropriation of current culture imbued these cut-and-paste designs works with an added edge of ideological flair. Take your culture and shove it. Its silly and we’re gonna make it our own.These ideas were directly taken from who might be the under-recognized predecessors to punk, the Dadaists, who — much like the punks — valued scissors and glue over paint and brushes. They believed in recycling old material to create new thought.
While OG punks would have probably never used the word ‘haute’ to describe themselves, they did prescribe to a certain style that valued not philosophies and beauty and order like the design that came before them, but rather chaos and a dissemination of shock. Using their often illegible and garish styles to shock the viewer out of apathy, the punk movement gave little thought to the commonly perceived ‘good’ design practices.
One of the most common spaces for this seeming lack of care for aesthetics was the zine. A zine is a self-published, self-distributed magazine, often with countercultural tendencies and propaganda.
Elsewhere Postmodernism was taking the form of New Wave Design which was championed in Switzerland by Wolfgang Weingart and in Holland by Gert Dumbar. The DIY design ethos gained new impetus with the arrival of the Apple mac in the 1980s which gave designers direct access to typefaces and started a whole new debate about ‘ugly’ design.
Below the contrast between the clean structure of Modernist design and DIY style of Punk.
Design Theory & Computer Design Context Journal 