How punk rock changed the course of design history
Punk, and its associated subcultures, revolutionized design practice. A slew of new shows and books reckons with its impact.
Do you remember the first zine someone put in your hands?
If you lived through punk’s heydey, or any of the subcultures that reverberated down from its birth to echo into the mid-aughts, you probably came across more than a few of them. Variable in quality, self-printed, gratuitously niche, and often full of self-referential winks, zine culture existed at a precise moment when computers were becoming more common, but social networks hadn’t yet made the notion of communicating with your peers on paper irrelevant. They mixed DIY culture and nascent technology with music and art. You sent away for them, hoarded them, and published your own responses, even if you were a high schooler imagining a culture thousands of miles–and probably a decade or two–away from your own.
They were outsider design. But the zines, fliers, and posters produced by punk and its associated subcultures were…
