One of the ways Pavitt distinguished Sup Pop was by thinking of it as a brand from day one. That was a big deal in an era where Kurt Cobain appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone wearing a T-shirt with the message “CORPORATE MAGAZINES STILL SUCK,” and anything corporate was dismissed as fake. Pavitt took his cues from Factory Records in the U.K. or the U.S. jazz label Blue Note. “You pick up a Blue Note record and you know what you’re getting,” he says. Even Sub Pop’s stark black-and-white logo was far more clean and corporate looking than others with hand-scrawled fonts. Sometimes they’d put the Sub Pop logo on the front of the record instead of tucked away in the back like most punk labels. “We were trying to be very consistent in our packaging, very consistent in our sound, really putting focus on the region, in the same way that Motown put focus on Detroit Soul,” Pavitt says.

Punk Rock Branding: How Bruce Pavitt Built Sub Pop In An Anti-Corporate Nirvana (via culturite)