BY DESIGN

What would parties be without flyers? It's not like the good old days when news of an event would pass organically from one tribe to another at the well. Aside from assuring you a drunken, sweaty model with erect nipples is going to be there, the printed flyer spreads the word like only selective guys with baseball caps littering the main street can. Clubs need branding, and DJs who get paid way too much money need to look hype. It's the flyer designer's job to make them come off like stars. For the most part, flyer designers fall into three easily defined categories: the Classicist, the Futurist and the Clueless.

Flyer by killer Classicists Seripop

THE CLASSICIST
The Classicist looks like he rummages through the garbage and knows more about U.S. foreign policy than Bush does, but masks it behind bad hair, a nervous tic, and a fondness for wheelchair weed. He isn't very good at being commercial and if you ask for a nice flyer for the Beenie Man show, you'll get a drawing of a cyclops shouting: "THE BATTLE OF GRUNDNOR WAS WON WITH GREAT EASE." You need to learn to deal with what the Classicist gives you.

Stylistic Influences: The Classicist's noggin is a complex sea of association, and even though it's filled with archetypal designers like Willy Fleckhaus, Mucha, and Herbert Bayer, most of his ideas sprout from Van Halen riffs and "the smell of chocolate." He doesn't care about how 60s typography is back, because he's been doing that shit since '87. He also knows how to draw, and not just blunted homeboys in phat pants.

Recommended Gigs: The Fall, Bohren Und Der Club of Gore, and only the best puppet shows.

Classicists to Check: Eikes Grafischer Hort, Serigraphie Populaire, John Peters.

I have no idea what it has to do with after-hours clubbing, but anyone with balls big enough to put a brain and a big monkey on a flyer deserves a round of applause.


THE FUTURIST
The Futurist also smokes a lot of weed, but due to his crippling ADD, he usually spends high time watching Akira and saves flyer design for two weeks past deadline. He's got a big head because he met fucking Goldie once, so stand the fuck back. Fiercely competitive and shortsighted, the Futurist is constantly slagging others off for copying his incredible ideas: the arrow, the use of bathroom symbols to represent "unisex," and the color yellow. He guards his hot new font like it was pulled all purplish and warm out of his own man-vagina, and when someone else uses it, it's not zeitgeist, it's a felony. Just because I like to laugh at the Futurist, I'm going to let you all in on a little level-37 design-wizard secret: myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/. That's a webpage where you can upload a scan of some text and it will tell you what the font is and I'm sure giving that out is going to land me in the hospital. I hope you get as horny as I did when I discovered it. Anyway, let's all help the Futurist lighten up by making techno birthday cards for each other.

Stylistic Influences: A little too consistent, the Futurist has a library that looks like an advertisement for The Designer's Republic and all their techie clones. Whether he can actually read is unclear, since his books are all pictures.

Recommended Gigs: All shows with German bald men as the leading act and events with oxymoronic names like "Advanced Trance."
Futurists to Check: Haven't you seen enough?


THE CLUELESS
Like the slow kid in math class, you can't ask too much of old Clueless. Looking at that wet paper flyer for a band you've never heard of, you can almost see him explaining to mom why he needs rent money. He is following the dream, and no one has the heart to tell him that, like a bad pianist, he was better at making ponchos. While his design is fucking horrible (he just discovered the goth-grunge Raygun font), he makes you feel better about yourself so you secretly love him. He also has the added benefit of being completely unaware of anything trendy in design, so his shittiness is timeless.

Recommended Gigs: "Furniture for sale" posters, launderette ads, inkjet flyers of grandma in her glory days.
Cluelesses to Check: Look at whatever is stuck to your shoe and you've got them covered.

Contrary to what you might think, these three designers rarely cross paths, since designing flyers isn't like baking; they don't all meet and talk about how great tight font-kerning is, or how they love Pantone color swatch 804c. Pity. I'd love to get these guys in a room together. (PS: And yes, they are all guys. Be honest—how many women do you know who fit into any of the three types described here? Being obsessive about designing shitty flyers is, let's face it, a sausage party.)


3EIGE
Send your portfolios, zines, show catalogues and tormented left ears to Dave Girard, 4200 St. Laurent Blvd. Suite 1005 Montreal, QC, H2W 2R2, or email me at .

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