Swissted – Four of My Old Punk Rock Flyers Reimagined by Mike Joyce – Graphic Design

This was a really cool surprise.

In the 1990’s my friend Mike Blur and I assembled, scanned in and shared a bunch of old punk rock flyers, including serveral that I designed as a kid back in the 1980’s. While by no means the most historic or bad ass or whatever, they were some of the earliest examples of the form to be widely available on the web, and as a result you can spot them all over the place now.

They regularly pop up in “best of” lists, coffee table books, documentary films, and on a zillion Tumblr feeds. There’s obviously never any attribution included (natch!) but who cares? I love it! These hastily-made throwaway scraps of paper have been given an afterlife that I couldn’t have possibly imagined back in high school when I was secretly making them in class, or at whatever job I was holding.

So, yeah! Totally unpredictable stuff for sure. And one of the most unexpected ways in which they were given new life has to be when a few of them turned up as reimagined Swiss Modernist style/ “International Typographic” posters. No, really! This happened! Hear me out!

For the folks who don’t already know, Swissted is an ongoing project by graphic designer Mike Joyce, the owner of Stereotype Design. Mike has mashed up his love of Punk Rock and Swiss Modernism into a website and a book that “…takes rock concert posters of the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s and remixes and reimagines them through a Swiss modernist lens.”

Well handily enough I also love both of those things, so I was stoked to find the project in the first place and even MORE stoked to see at least four of my old flyers numbering among his work (hell, one of them even featured my old band The Weird Lovemakers!). Even cooler, when Mike got a deal with Quirk Books he contacted me to see if I’d let him include reproductions of some of my original designs in the preface. As a result, four (out of only six) of the actual vintage pieces shown were actually made by my grubby little fingers. Tooooo coooooool.

So here’s a quick little gallery showing my originals alongside Mike’s interpretations (and when you’re done with these be sure to head on over the the full site so you can take in the rest).

Thanks again for including me in your project, Mike!