How to Create Punk-Style Graphics
Pull out your studded belt and harness your inner angsty teen, because we are about to delve into the edgier side of design.
Punk rock is not just a music genre — it’s a form of fashion and a lifestyle. To be “punk rock” means to be edgy, anti-mainstream, and to embrace one’s own individuality. However, if you think of punk rock in terms of design, you’ll notice that there it has a definite style in that arena as well.
Torn, cut, or burnt paper; grungy textures and backgrounds; aged or distorted black and white imagery; scribbled, scrambled, or distressed fonts — by dissecting punk rock style poster design, we notice that these are obvious recurring elements. So, let’s use these ingredients to create a punk rock-style graphic!
Collecting your Assets
Pretty much all of these elements can be found on Google, but why not have some fun and create them by hand?
You can create your own grungy textures by creating crayon rubbings on concrete and scanning them into the computer or taking photos of textured surfaces. Take a look at Samantha Richardson’s article, “Creating Textures with Bitmap TIFFs” to learn how to make your textures into editable graphics for Adobe Illustrator.
For the magazine cut-out look, do just that — cut up a magazine and scan in the pieces. Or do you want a distressed font? If you don’t want to create your own type, go to DaFont for plenty of grungy typefaces, such as Devastated.
Creating a Half-Toned Image
A half-toned image is a photo that has been printed as a series of dots varying in size according to the tonal qualities of the image.
Half-toned images are reminiscent of old photos printed in magazines, so creating one will make your magazine cut-out feel more authentic. Begin by pulling a photo you like into Adobe Photoshop. You can half-tone the entire image, but it you would prefer to cut out a figure from the image and only half-tone that, then you’ll need to remove the background.
This can be done in a few ways:
1. Use the magic eraser tool if the background is a solid color
2. Use the pen tool to draw around the figure you want to isolate; right click (or control + click) and choose “Make Selection”; click “Select” at the top of the screen, and in the drop-down menu, choose “Inverse”; then delete.
After removing the background convert the image to grayscale, then to Bitmap.
Photoshop may ask if you want to flatten your layers (just click “OK”) and then a couple of menus will pop up. On the first, select “Halftone Screen” in the drop-down menu.
On the second, you’ll be prompted to adjust the frequency, angle, and shape of the dots in the halftone — there isn’t one specific way to do this, just play around with the options until you find a halftone that you like.
Save your file as a PNG or TIFF, and you’re ready to assemble your graphic!
Creating the Graphic
To begin, open a new art board in Adobe Illustrator. I’ve made mine square in aspect ratio for ease of viewing and sharing on social media.
Gather all of your collected assets and go to File>Place to bring them all into your composition. Begin by layering the background with grungy imagery and textures until it looks the way you like it.
Now, if you have a half-toned image, we want it to look like it was cut out of a magazine. So, create a gray or tan shape around your half-toned image that will act as the newsprint or magazine paper that it is printed on. Place that shape on top of a wrinkled paper image, go into the Opacity menu on the right side bar, and change the opacity style to “Multiply.” This will cause the shape to take on the appearance of the wrinkled paper.
But we don’t want the rest of the wrinkled paper image, so let’s cut that out. Highlight both the cut-out shape and the wrinkled paper image, right click (or control + click), and select “Create Clipping Mask.”
You should now have a cut-out shape that looks like a piece of wrinkled paper. Add your half-toned image on top, and you officially have a magazine cut-out! To create a jittery effect, I duplicated the half-toned image and slightly offset its placement on top of the original half-toned image.
Now we can do the easy part — placing the rest of the assets on the art board. Arrange your elements just the way you like it, adding type if you wish.
And there you have it! A graphic to express your inner punk to your friends.
Explore other possibilities and get creative — after all, truly being punk rock means being your own individual. So, share with us what you created, we’d love to see it!
Oh, and don’t forget to stick it to the man.
