This article was originally published on Substack by No Good Kid in July 2026.
Wasted Blood by bitpunk.fm, 2026
In 2025,
invited me to design his first collection of poetry, Wasted Blood. It was after our first collaboration on a lunarpunk zine Dark Forest, and as we were just starting to get to know each other, I was very pleased with his trust. Especially after I read that collection.I already knew that bitpunk.fm is an ex-Navy guy, who had seen war with his own eyes. I could only imagine the things he went through over there, and what came after he got back. I mean I’m pretty much a simple dude who hasn’t even experience military training. How do I even approach such heavy stuff?
The war
Wasted Blood is actually a double collection, with bitpunk.fm’s poetry in the front and his translations of Bloody Sonnets by the Slovak poet Pavol Országh Hviezdoslav in the back. Together they form two views on war, with a gap of more than 100 years. And they both are not about rage first, but rather about some kind of reconciliation. That’s, by the way, what I find most powerful about it.
There started my thinking about the design mood. These days everyone is shouting fuck war, screw Trump, to hell with whatever… desperate anger all around. I remembered that bitpunk.fm told me this artifact should carry a little punk. In this situation, what could be a greater act of protest than silent kindness? I decided to go with that.
But I was still pretty scared because I wasn’t sure about the overall visual language. Like, at all.
The look
So the obvious choice for an anti-war book would be either literal scenes from war to capture its horrors. Or you can go Banksy, put some flowers inside guns, and shift it towards something sophisticated. You can also do it the abstract way and paint the emotions. Or turn it into something seemingly unrelated, like telling stories (visually) of the people from war zones, kind of “between the scenes”.
bitpunk.fm’s book, though, is too personal, too fragile for any of that. As the ideal time for getting the work done was approaching, I started feeling desperate (which is actually a very common phase of the creative process). In this state of panic, I almost decided to use the motif of analog photography collages that would run through the whole book and paint some wannabe-artistic abstract emotional rollercoaster. Really, really bad stuff.
At the last moment before sending this bullshit to bitpunk.fm, the instruction popped into my head: read it again.
It opens with the dedication.
“To the roughly 30,000 American veterans who committed suicide after surviving the Global War on Terrorism abroad only to be haunted by horrors at home.”
And right there, on the first page, there it was. Suddenly it was crystal clear. It’s not a manifest, not a documentary, not a protest. It’s a monument.
Almost instantly I had this vision of a somewhat damaged American flag, with the stars leaving it. It’s a symbol of the souls of lost veterans becoming free of their physical homeland that wasn’t capable of taking care of them. As a bonus, the leaving stars transform into birds to reinforce the idea of freedom.
I sent the first version of the flag to bitpunk.fm, explaining the idea that this was the only illustration the book needed, and to my great relief it was a success.
I did a few sketches and AI image generations, and because I’m not a good illustrator, I ultimately asked another No Good Kid (it’s sort of a collective) to do the drawing. They did a great job capturing the punk aesthetic while keeping it clear and artistic. Again, I didn’t want it to feel aggressive.
From there the ideas started flowing in the most natural way. Because the illustration itself felt like something a regular person would sketch, it occurred to me that, because of its personal feel, this book should look like something bitpunk.fm himself would make on his own.
From the start we talked about releasing this book in a limited print run. To support the exclusivity and the urge to own the physical book, I came up with the idea of adding doodles showing the star-to-bird transformation on each page, so when you flip through the book, you see this transformation as an old-school animation. I’m kind of proud of this one.
The feel
I knew this book would be thin. If you have a thin book, it’s better to make the format smaller, otherwise, you end up with something that feels more like a magazine. While talking about the format, bitpunk.fm mentioned that soldiers carry small notebooks for writing down notes, codes, and stuff. So the smaller format (the book is 120 × 175 mm) would support the handmade feel.
To come even closer to the idea of “bitpunk.fm’s notebook”, I had him handwrite the text on the cover and a message to the readers at the end of the book.
It was all coming together. The last thing to decide was how to format the text. I tried a few different styles, even black pages with white text, but then again I reminded myself that this is not about design. The design should be invisible so the reader can fully focus on the poetry. So I went with the most classical text formatting, with a lot of white space so the words could breathe.
One of my influences for the overall style of the book was the character Jess Mariano from Gilmore Girls.
When I’m developing ideas, I like to think about specific people who might like the final thing (whether they’re real or not, it’s the character that helps narrow the concept).
Jess is known for reading a lot of genuinely good literature. I think anytime he’s in the show and isn’t talking to someone, he’s either having a smoke or holding a book. Think Hemingway, Ginsberg, Rand, Austen, Shakespeare… that kind of stuff.
What bitpunk.fm did with his poetry somehow reminded me of that energy. It’s raw, yet cultivated. It has punk energy, but not the mohawk. It’s anti-war, but it’s not political. Something like when Hendrix played the U.S. national anthem to a bunch of hippies, saying you don’t have to love your government to love your country.
That was the energy I wanted to put into Wasted Blood. Something so real and true that anyone can connect with it, and something that would be cool to Jess.
The book
I intentionally made the whole book black and white. Although, after it went to print, I had one more idea to add a little bit of color. And then this piece of music history brought me inspiration: In the 1970s, the band KISS released their own comic book, and as a marketing performance, they went to the printer, had a doctor draw their blood, which was then mixed into the printing ink.
I discussed this idea with bitpunk.fm, and he performed this stunt, not with his actual blood, but with just a drop of blood-red ink, giving each print an original, personal touch. Check out the video of his process.
You probably understand by now that Wasted Blood somehow became personal to me during the process. There were some very raw emotions popping up as I was working with the key flag illustration, choosing the right place for it, making it the main and only visual theme of the book, and finally turning it into the animation…
I’m very thankful for the opportunity to work on this. It’s definitely one of my all-time favorite projects of my design career.
Thanks, bitpunk.fm, for trusting me with such a personal and beautiful project.
NGK