Punk Photocopied Fanzine
- ransom note
- xerox punk
- 1977 fanzine
Third-generation photocopy: crushed blacks, ransom-note letters and everything slightly skewed.
Opens an image model with the prompt in it. The price is on the page before you sign in.
What it is for
The photocopier was the punk printing press, and everything about the look comes from its limits: no grey, no colour, no registration, no cost.
It also reads as made overnight. A poster that looks like it was copied at work and stapled to a lamp post has an urgency no designed poster can borrow.
How it works
Crush the tones. Copy the copy until every grey is either solid black or blank white, with the black areas filling in and breaking up.
Cut the title letter by letter from different newspapers and magazines, each a different size and typeface, glued at different angles.
Skew the whole sheet on the glass so one edge has the copier shadow. Add a typewritten detail slip pasted on crooked, and one colour added by hand with a marker.
When to use it
Use it for a punk or hardcore gig, a protest, a squat party, a record fair, a zine fair, a film night with teeth.
Leave it alone for anything official. The style is specifically about not asking permission.
Told apart from its neighbours
Zine cut-and-paste is the broader, gentler version: same scissors, less aggression, often about a hobby rather than a scene.
Dada collage is the ancestor and is composed carefully. Punk is genuinely careless.
Grunge typography is a designer imitating this on a computer, with layers and art direction.
Where it was used
Mark Perry's Sniffin' Glue, typed and copied from 1976, is the founding fanzine. Jamie Reid's Sex Pistols sleeves took the ransom-note lettering to a national audience in 1977, and every hardcore scene since has rebuilt the same kit.
- Sniffin' Glue
- Jamie Reid
- Sex Pistols sleeves
The prompt
Replace the blanks with your own event, keep the rest. Then run it on an image model.
poster for <event>, 1977 punk photocopied fanzine, third-generation xerox with crushed solid blacks and blown-out whites and no mid tones, ransom-note title with each letter cut from a different newspaper and glued at a different angle, a high-contrast photograph reduced to black shapes, safety pin and torn edge, the whole sheet photographed slightly skewed with the copier shadow down one side, black and white with one hand-added marker colour, <date, time and place> typed on a typewriter and pasted on crooked
What goes wrong
The model returns a clean design with a photocopy filter. Ask for third-generation xerox with crushed solid blacks, blown-out whites and no mid tones at all.
The second failure is a tidy ransom note. Say each letter is a different size and typeface, cut from a different source and glued at a different angle.
Leave out
grey tones, alignment, clean edges, colour photography, subtlety
Watch for
No mid tones. Every grey must go to solid black or blown-out white.
Questions
Print it
Pay for the one run. No subscription, and the price is on the model page before you sign in.
