Joy Division: Logo #8

Illustrated by an as-yet unknown hand and found by Joy Division drummer Stephen Morris in 1979, this frontspiece for the "Unknown Pleasures" LP comes from an edition of the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Astronomy. The image was originally presented as a black lines on white space, but on a hunch, designer Peter Saville flipped it. Eureka! What you see are 100 successive bursts - go ahead and count, we'll wait - from CP 1919, the first known pulsar. The more gothy reference texts refer to this as "the scream of a dying star", but we all know that in space, no one can hear you scream. In September 1979, "Alien" premiered in the "United" Kingdom and bore that chestnut out completely. Another instance of an image assuming de facto logo status, if only because for the past thirty years it has been reproduced incessantly on badges, patches, stickers and knickers. Joy Division contemporary (and no slouch in the design department, he) Jon Wozencroft has a nice "secret origin" story about the cover in the summer 2007 issue of Tate Etc. Magazine.

Gay Dad: Logo #6

Created in 1999 by Factory Records design genius Peter Saville, the "Walking Man" innocuously heralded a British guitar band whose short creative life was battered by controversy and ended after a three-year rocket ride from top to bottom. Capitol was thwarted in its intentions to promote the band Stateside; the conventional wisdom was summed up by one apocryphal publicist who "said he'd resign if he had to work a band called Gay Dad," according to singer Cliff Jones. In this sign there is a clever override of daily experience that - Protestant work ethic aside - effectively makes every crossroads in the United States a four-way advertising campaign. For gay dads. And of course the implicit observation with this logo is that with every street come pedestrians, and some of them are dads, and some of those dads are gay. But at least they're white gays, so that should have been comforting to someone.