If your aim is to agitate and even upset, which is undeniably a component of punk rock, color discord is an effective tool in graphic design. The album cover for the Sex Pistols’ Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols uses color discord to represent the disruptive but exciting nature of their music. The contrast of bright pink and yellow induces a grotesque disparity in colors that interact neither analogously or complementary on the color wheel. This celebrated ugliness catches the eye and asserts a shock-value characteristic of punk visual art (exemplary in the fashion designs by Vivienne Westwood from the same era – who often used other methods of offense, such as controversial imagery and symbols like swastikas). Discord in this album cover is not limited to color, but typography and form are also purposely imbalanced. The majority punk visual art has been limited to black-and-white designs (because of their tendency to be reproduced with black-and-white copiers), and attempts at visual friction depend on this disharmony of lettering and savagely cut paper collage.
In the US release of the album, the values were inverted and the hues were shifted a bit on the color wheel, but the clashing discord remains the basis of design.
No comments:
Post a Comment