Punk's visual language was born in 1976–77 London, forged on Xerox machines with scissors, rubber cement, and stolen newspaper clippings. Jamie Reid's defaced Queen Elizabeth and ransom-note typography for the Sex Pistols became the movement's defining images — deliberately ugly, confrontational, and impossible to mistake for anything corporate.

The aesthetic is anti-design made manifest: every letter a different size, every edge torn, every surface degraded by photocopy generations. Hot pink and acid yellow scream from cheap white paper. Nothing is aligned, nothing is polished, and that is exactly the point.