There is a clear connection between Saville’s utilisation of signage aesthetic and the influential re-appropriation of Autobahn. One can imagine the appropriation of modernist graphic design in contemporary music culture, as an innovation that spread through a web-like network from Düsseldorf’s Kraftwerk, to Manchester’s Factory Records and then onto even more remote nodes of the network, before eventually the signal returns entirely reshaped. The application of an aesthetic like modernism to music culture can only have significance if either the conditions for its significance coincidentally exist or a force is cultivating the conditions for its significance to exist. For Factory Records, its logo was a combination of both these circumstances. As industrial production waned in the then transforming northern metropolis, Saville used the factory icon because it succeeded a history of industrial iconography, transforming it into a symbol for new cultural production. This, paired with a slightly displaced Helvetica Bold, was the application of design as a force of cultivation.
