New 850 t-shirt!

[matthew1]

Sorry Capndirk, the print is on the front. But because I print these myself, I can print on the back for yours.

[matthew1]

I've been toying with the idea for this for about ten years. Over those ten years I spent probably fifteen hours in Photoshop every so often trying to make the outline of a P80 wagon work its way into the lines at the bottom. I had little success and it just looked... not great. I'm also a purist for the most part, and my work didn't sit well. I figured whatever I end up with, if I'm the only one who orders one from myself, that's a $90 t-shirt (screen+one blank) and I'm ok with that. If others get one... heck yea.

I love this genre of music, and I've combined two of my interests, and thrown my hat in the hallowed palace of designers who have made a permutation of this design.

I also toyed with using the actual 850 badge design in place of the text "850", but decided against that for two reasons: it might be trademarked, and again: the purist thing. If I was going to use the 850 badge, I would also use the Volvo wordmark, but then I'd be inviting a stern letter from Volvo legal. The album design text is Helvetica.

In addition to all that perspective, I'd like to add that I put in some serious time to find an image large enough to use. I probably considered dozens of various .jpg, .png, and even the pulsar data itself in .csv format. You need lots more detail (resolution) for a printed or screened image than you do for PC/phone/iPad screen. Anybody can find a sharp .jpg of this... sharp enough for Web sites. But none of the dozens I found were large enough. In the end I found the best candidate in a .pdf, strangely, that itself was created from the actual pulsar data. I then did a bunch of editing in Photoshop to thin some of the lines. There were about ten that were randomly twice as thick as the others.

In the future I'll make other Volvo models. I'll mask off 850 and make a second screen with 240, etc.

Here's the "long" version of the story I promised, but I had an AI do it.

The Story Behind Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures Album Art

The iconic cover of Joy Division’s debut album Unknown Pleasures (1979) features a white-on-black image of pulsating radio waves – a stack of 100 successive pulses from the first known pulsar, CP 1919 (now PSR B1919+21).

Where the image really comes from:
• The diagram was first published in The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Astronomy (1977)
• It was created by astronomer Harold D. Craft as part of his PhD research at Cornell using data from the Arecibo Observatory
• CP 1919 was discovered in 1967 by Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Antony Hewish – it was the very first pulsar ever found (originally nicknamed “Little Green Man 1” because they briefly thought it might be alien!)

How it ended up on the album:
• Drummer Stephen Morris owned the astronomy book and showed the image to the band
• Bernard Sumner and designer Peter Saville (Factory Records) instantly fell in love with it
• Saville flipped the original black-on-white version to white-on-black, put it on a textured black sleeve, added tiny text, and famously left the band’s name off the front
• Classic Factory Records move: they never asked permission. Nobody thought the record would blow up the way it did.

What the band saw in it:
• They were obsessed with science, space, and cosmic signals
• The repeating pulses felt like a perfect visual metaphor for emotional crisis, neurological “fits” (Ian Curtis had epilepsy), and mechanical repetition
• The album title itself comes from a dark reference in the book House of Dolls, adding another heavy layer

Later reactions:
• Harold Craft only discovered his diagram was on one of the most famous album covers ever decades later – he thinks it’s cool
• Jocelyn Bell Burnell has also said she loves what happened to her discovery
• The image is now on millions of T-shirts, tattoos… and yes, even official Disney merch (much to the horror of some old post-punk fans)

Pure serendipity: a 1960s radio-astronomy plot → a drummer’s coffee-table book → Peter Saville’s gut instinct → one of the most recognisable images in music history.

Screenshot 2025-11-25 at 16-36-04 The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Astronomy Original Pulsar graph Peter Saville source material.png (1.01 MiB) Viewed 977 times

Screenshot 2025-11-25 at 16-35-52 The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Astronomy Original Pulsar graph Peter Saville source material.png (676.67 KiB) Viewed 977 times

[abscate]

I do have to mention that Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell was omitted from the 1974 Nobel prize in physics , which was awarded to her advisor. It probably only ranks behind Madam Chu as the worst omission in Physics Nobel Prizes. The same wanker who took the prize in 1974 told Dame Bell her data was noise and to stop working on the project. What a Richard Head.

[abscate]

I do have to mention that Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell was omitted from the 1974 Nobel prize in physics , which was awarded to her advisor. It probably only ranks behind Madam Chu as the worst omission in Physics Nobel Prizes. The same wanker who took the prize in 1974 told Dame Bell her data was noise and to stop working on the project. What a Richard Head.

[BlackBart]

I have flown low over the peaks of the Pulsar Range several times, but I am yet to recognize the profile of an 850.

[Capndirk]

Sorry Capndirk, the print is on the front. But because I print these myself, I can print on the back for yours.

Thanks, Matthew, that would be great! I actually thought the image of the shirt was a back print, but looking at it again, I now see the front neck-line scoop. I guess i got excited and saw just the complete silhouette!
Why is the "thank" link not showing on your post? Or the whole thread, for that matter? "Sticky" category?

[matthew1]

I thought of something: I can just mask off "850", so if you want one of these but don't care much for having 850 on it, here's a version I just put up without it.

Get it here:
https://www.matthewsvolvosite.com/joy-d ... o-t-shirt/

[BlackBart]

Look what I just noticed on a magazine cover in my LR!

[volvolugnut]

BB you would not pull our legs would you?

volvolugnutr

[matthew1]

Look what I just noticed on a magazine cover in my LR!


IMG_0298.jpeg

Good eye! You'll probably run into it every so often now that your External Visual Recognizer is keyed to the graphic.

FYI there are two Disney shirts I mentioned in a post above, on eBay, and their asks are $300 and $400.

Thus, I predict these MVS shirts will go for ten or twenty million USD in a few years. That is no guarantee, only my own opinion and ballpark prediction.