Punks On The Net Podcast Logos
2020, Adobe Photoshop & Adobe Illustrator, 1200px x 1200px, 1200px x 628px
A series of logo explorations for my friends' new comedy/music podcast, Punks On The Net.
The latest two friends in a string of folks I know, still cooped up at home for the most part, have decided to pour their thoughts into a downloadable audio diary chronicling their musical tastes, weird, funny and discussion-worthy stuff they find on the internet, and general existential dread.
Their initial ideas for the logo sprang from UK82 punk imagery....a skeleton in a ragged leather jacket, with the classic punk liberty spike hairdo, sitting in front of an old computer. I decided to go with the classic Macintosh II as inspiration for the computer.
UK82 visuals sprang from a very specific time in British punk history during the Thatcher era, when poverty, unemployment and general hostility among the working class was at an all-time high. Austerity, social tension, racist scapegoating and brushes with fascism were the order of the day in early 80's Britain, along with the still-looming Cold War threat of nuclear annihilation. The visual aesthetics of UK82 punk usually incorporated graphic wartime imagery to reinforce the futility of funding the military-industrial complex, and a very "lo-fi", high-contrast, generally black & white feel and texture. Spray-paint and stenciled lettering, cut-and-paste collage aesthetics (a holdover from earlier punk aesthetics), and hand-drawn, almost comic book style art were the visual orders of the day.
The amped-up, aggressive, apocalyptic, buzzsaws-on-sandpaper sound of UK82 punk made its way to Japan (a country whose ties to nuclear war and imperialism were still very apparent), ushering in a golden age of Japanese punk and hardcore with heavy anti-war themes as well. A couple of my early ideas incorporated a translation of the podcast's title to kanji to pay homage to Japanese punk aesthetic at the time, before I started to explore the circle "stamp" logo prevalent in the visual output of Crass, a seminal UK82 punk band.
Finally, a solution was reached incorporating the circular stamp, the computer and the skeleton. The podcast, with its lo-fi, antisocial, high-anxiety dystopian aesthetic, is now available on Apple Podcasts and all major podcatcher apps! Download today!
