Happy Mondays

"Rave culture brought about an almost universal graphic language, which in the decades since its first incarnation has become inextricably bound to its origins, yet transcendent of them" - Emily Gosling, from What Rave Culture is Teaching Modern Graphic Designers

Rave Flyer from Chelsea Louise Berlin’s book: Rave Art

Rave culture was of course built around electronic music, often made through improvisations with both the existing and emerging technologies of the day. It was exemplified by its unbound creativity and it's own new aesthetic. This aesthetic has had an incredible influence on graphic design, as Emily Gosling explores in her essay; "Rave posters of the 1980s and 90s demonstrated a joyful disregard for convention as did anti-design tropes for punk in previous decades... Type was brash and bold, colours a retina-burning neon, and imagery—like the sounds and samples pervading the scene—delinquently cut and pasted together."

The posters from rave culture inspired some of the most interesting graphic design treatments and illustrations, that in time, became a visual shorthand for rave. The most recognisable is, of course, the smiley...

This happy yellow symbol first emerged in the 1960s, and while its parentage is much contested, the story goes that it was first seen in 1963 on American children’s TV programme The Funny Company. In the same year Massachusetts-based commercial artist Harvey Ball designed a smiley icon for State Mutual Life Assurance, but didn’t copyright the design. David Stern, a designer from Seattle, also claimed he’d created it, and until this day its true authorship remains unproven.

The design shot to wider recognition in the 1970s when Philadelphian brothers Bernard and Murray Spain paired the smiley with the slogan “have a nice day” on badges, selling at least 50 million in 1972 alone. The icon’s place as the face of rave was secured when in 1988, Bomb the Bass lifted it from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ hit comic Watchmen, and slapped it onto the cover of their single Beat Dis. Soon this round yellow icon had morphed between summer of love, pin badge, evil nemesis, and finally to club culture icon and it has been repeatedly appropriated since.