The Young brothers, Malcolm and Angus, named their band AC/DC after seeing the symbol on their sister Margaret’s sewing machine back in the early 1970s.
It was a genius name for a hard rock band that would go on to conquer the world, augmented by a brilliant logo design by Los Angeles-born graphic designer Gerard Huerta.
Huerta used the upper case characters of the Guttenberg Bible and incorporated the lightning bolt into the logo.
It has since become the most popular logo in rock’n’roll history. More T-shirts, baseball caps, baby clothes, keyrings, patches and tattoos have been produced with that logo than for any other band in history, according to online music merchandise retailer Rush Order Tees.
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You couldn’t escape AC/DC or their ubiquitous logo last Saturday night at Croke Park. Young and old (there’s no escaping the fact there were lots of ageing rockers present) wore the T-shirt in all its different guises. They also wore the glow-in-the-dark devil’s horns first popularised after the album and song Highway to Hell.
Everybody there was present not to go gently into that good night, but to rock, rock against the dying of the light.
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