Punk n Soul - My Days as a Rag-Tag DIY Flyer Designer

One of my favorite parts of DJing has always been designing the flyers for my events. The flyer really sets the tone for the event. Obviously it can also make or break your event by either drawing people in or repelling them away.

Back in the day prior to computer design becoming the norm in ALL graphic design, I revelled in the process of hand making my flyers. I poured over them, every minute detail. Often times I was the only one who appreciated those details, but it really didn't mater to me. It was all about the process.

Though I don't have the time to invest in such laborious projects these days, I really do miss that aspect of creating a DJ event. Something about making a flyer by hand really personalizes it to the audience (at least in my opinion). I like looking at those old flyers and really being able to see my personality dripping off of the page.

If time permits, I do still try to put some sort of "hand made" aspect into each one of my flyers whether it's personally taking the photo of the image used in the flyer or cutting out some of the lettering, gluing it onto the page and then rescanning it. There has to be some part of ME in that design, beyond what I arrange and digitally manipulate.

By and large though, I think our culture has really changed and the way people find out about shows and things is mostly by the internet.  People don't really even stop to look at flyers any more.  That is the MAIN reason I don't invest the time there like I used to.

Anyways, I thought it would be fun to share some of my old hand made, computer free, punk-soul flyers from the olden times of my dj "career".

This is my crude drawing featuring real sequins and glitter

There's a lot of detail on this one.  It's kind of hard to see in this scan.

I think this was my first dance with Michelle Noel (my DJ Hero!) in Olympia.  

It was also my first event flyer.

This one was round. I wasn't able to scan the entire flyer.  

I'm a big fan of odd shaped flyers.  

It really makes them stand out next to other flyers.

The background on this one is some really cool vintage op art fabric I was saving for just the right thing.

This one was crazy.  It looks a bit sloppy in retrospect.  It was a lot of work to hand draw all that lettering.  I also glued sequins to a lot of the individual copies of this one.

This is one of my favorites and yet it was one of the easiest to make.  I remember at the time thinking, "this was too easy."  Anyways, most of the lettering and accents are paper cut-outs.

This one was not easy at all.  It was my most intricate flyer.  I copied all the faces and cut them out, glued them to the page.  I hand drew the a lot of the lettering including "juke blues" which was a process in itself.  I then carved stamps for the "Chess", "23" and "Make your move" which were then stamped on each individual flyer.  Finally, I cut out the red chess pieces out fo velvet ribbon and glues them to each individual flyer.  IT IS TOTALLY INSANE IN RETROSPECT!

This was another flyer of unusual shape.  

I cut out all the flyers in the shape of a rocket.