This warped identity for Pressure Systems was made with an old Xerox photocopier

“The Xerox copier has always fascinated me,” says Vincent Howcutt, creative director of They That Do. “You don’t really know what you will get each time you press that copy button, especially when you are slowly moving your images around over the glass.” Vincent decided to take hold of this age-old technique, often reserved for the likes of office paperwork, for an overarching identity for Pressure Systems, a new record label form the London-based DJ Fergus Sweetland.

Intrigued by the idea of making rhythm tangible and visualising the movement of sounds, the designer trialed early experiments for the project by moving his type tests across his old scanner to create pulled shapes and abstract patterns, all whilst listening to Fergus’ “warped, wobbly beats”. By pushing letter forms up and down and side to side on the glass in time with the sounds, Vincent made piles of unexpected outputs where forms felt like they were “not deliberately designed but accidentally achieved”.

By using scanning, Vincent discovered a way to make naturally wobbly and warped visuals that didn’t mimic any existing graphic conventions in the techno scene – something he wanted to steer clear of. The identity is full of unique visuals that can’t ever quite be recreated in the same way again. Vincent says: “It felt very organic to use an analogue process, a process that would have been used back when the techno scene started to rise in the mid 1980s in Detroit – a time when analogue was the norm. The main challenge was knowing when to stop, as every time you have another play something better would evolve from every turn of the copy!”

After the scanning process, the designer dived into a whole world of colour, abstracting the warped curves of his scanned shapes to look like layers of dense smokey lighting and lasers that make up “the atmosphere of a warehouse club or outdoor rave”. These colour schemes eventually formed the background to his wonky logo.

For the label’s logo marque, Vincent wanted it to look like “it was created in the future, in another galaxy or lunar landscape” in order to reflect Fergus’ “unearthed sounds”. Squashed and stretched out, the marque appears to be in movement, bouncing across club night-like posters and T-shirts, and the type pairing clashes Swizzy Mono and Albra Book. “Imagine the typefaces as that moment where you are deep in a warehouse, vibing to the beats and then you go out to the smoking area and have a warm hug from a friend. That’s how we saw Swizzy Mono and Albra Book working together — very intense vs a warm hug.”

With Pressure Systems’ new look just marking the beginning, Vincent and Fergus are keen to cook up further collaborations through their joint interests in the natural world and the influences it has on rhythm, sound and visual systems. “It was inspiring to see the start of Fergus’ journey with the label,” says Vincent, “It really was a simple, un-contrived and natural way of working compared to more commercially restrained projects.”