Punk as decayPunk asdecay

In May I joined Klika.digital Season 1, a community built around a series of workshops with designers including Tomasz Biskup @tom.biskup, Jacek Rudzki @znajomygrafik and Maryan Ivasyk @maryanivasyk. The first brief was to pick a band or artist and design a key visual for their tour.

I chose Pidżama Porno, a Polish punk rock band, and specifically their album Futurista.

“Futurista” is Pidżama Porno’s second album. It was recorded in 1990 and initially circulated exclusively as unofficial, pirated cassettes. It was officially released for the first time in 1996. As a result, it is a deeply emotional and, at the same time, highly political album that captures the mood of Poles during the fall of communism.

Pidżama is a band that is still active today, and it’s common to see them revisit their older songs or albums during concerts or by releasing reissues. “Futurista” seems to me to be largely overlooked in this context.

I chose it for the project because it’s one of my favourite albums, and I come back to it often whenever I feel like something more punky but at the same time extremely poetic.

For me, this album was always about mixing rage with hope. Futurista is the band’s rawest record, and I wanted that rawness to come through in the visual identity. One of my central themes was decay — rust, fading, corrosion, the passage of time and its inevitability. At its core, the album is about the fall of communism in Poland.

I connected this idea of decay with the futuristic element of the title. As the album is also tied to a contemporary tour, I imagined abstract colours and raw shapes appearing through layers of decay. I wanted to move away from the obvious punk imagery of reds and safety pins, and approach the subject in a more poetic way, while still keeping some edge.

An important objective for me was to do thorough visual research and step outside my comfort zone. I really enjoy maximalist forms, but in my everyday work there isn’t always room for them. Projects often end up as a more “safe” version of what they could be, shaped by the limitations of a brief.

With this personal project, I wanted to give myself the freedom to experiment, push the visual language further, and create something genuinely interesting and different.

The tour is six cities and six dates, so the poster had to survive being one of many: printed in three colourways, pasted over itself, and still readable as one campaign from the other side of the street.

Every version is built from the same collage — rust, peeling paint, concrete and scraps of old newsprint — recoloured until the decay stops looking like a ruin and starts looking like a future. Nothing is clean: the tearing is printed, not accidental, so each poster arrives already looking like it survived something.

The type is Karrik by Jean-⁠Baptiste Morizot and Lucas Le Bihan, set in blocks that lie across the collage like tape stuck over a wall.

The identity was also adapted for digital, from social media posts and stories to the profile grid and a simple one-⁠page ticket site. I wanted to see how this textured approach would work in a digital space.

Apart from typical merch, I also imagined some upcycled pieces. Maryan told me that I could think about the layering we have in the key visual and use it in merch, which led me to imagine some upcycled items that I felt would fit the character of the tour really well.