One should find better things to write, or listen, or moan on endlessly about other than graphic communication and its folly.

We could muse over a wonderful piece of architecture using timber and glass in the middle of land locked site in London, or the joys of some type design from some boys from Brighton UK born around 1985, or the idea of an uplifting landscape that may offer some utopic moment amid a busy day.

Then there is Ian Dury and the Blockheads and their masterpiece “Hit me with your rhythm stick”. After ten back to back replays – one thinks that what makes this tune hum, or jump off the record player? Is it the tune’s chattering, hap hazard and chaotic piano line, the frantic bass along with lead guitar and screaming double sax elixir, bathed in the drone of what is Dury’s quite unremarkable voice? No of course not, it is the third verse you idiot.

It seems no coincidence that one of graphic design’s most enduring lights – Barny Bubbles also happened to create a tasty record sleeve to complement a tune with matching allure. There is a design project of some variation hidden in its 3 minutes and 40 seconds somewhere, maybe in honour of the punk era’s forgotten souls – Bubbles certainly found something to design about. Just make sure your ears are well protect in-between irrational bursts of speaker volume.

Pink, green, black and white forms are amassed into another one of bubble’s famous puzzles. The green form is possibly a plan or print revealing the meaning of the random black white shapes. On the other hand, with a little imagination, the black and white shape look like a block head character welding a rhythm stick. Like Dury, Bubble’s approach to graphics is a unique expression that blurred art and commercial graphics. The crude reproduction tools available in 1978, as compared to today’s technologies, had little effect upon the end product, one would argue that Bubbles made it work to the piece’s advantage.

Vale Ian and Barney.

Happy Birthday Marco – fantastic.

Read more about Barney and Ian here

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