Reproducing Joy Division's "Unknown Pleasures" Album Cover in Adobe Illustrator

This is a short post. Suffice to say I'm designing a new tattoo for myself, and it's based on the cover art from one of my all-time favourite albums: Joy Division's "Unknown Pleasures". I went searching online and couldn't find a decent vector graphic reproduction of the artwork, so I decided to recreate it in Illustrator.

The pulsar wave was obtained via some clever D3.js code courtesy of Observable founder Mike Bostock. Which is pretty damn cool in and of itself. I'm no data science nerd or anything, but it's neat to see something as dry as data science (sorry if you're a data scientist, but it just ain't my thing) being used to create art. Hell, it's cool to see code being used to create art in general.

Once I figured out that part it just came down to figuring out which font was used on the original cover art (SPOILER ALERT: It's just Helvetica), and inverting the colours on the SVG I obtained and imported from Mike Bostock's code.

I've included the finished project below, along with a download link to the original .ai source file (along with .svg and .eps versions) should you want to use it yourselves.

Enjoy!
(P.S.: For more music-related content, don't forget to check out my other blog, My Life in Music)

         Source Files: Illustrator :: EPS :: SVG