Welcome to the sadness.

I have been a longtime partygoer, enjoying beats since the mid-'90s, and having attended my first proper rave back in 1997.  One of the things I remember about club and rave nights way back when was that each party flyer had its own flavor.  Some were ginormous 24x36 posters, others were tri-folds, or simple 4x6 sizes, or even ones that folded into interesting shapes.  I've seen one flyer that folded into a giant cereal box.  In Amsterdam, one of the weeklies there distributed flyers in small plastic bags that looked like acid sheets.  For a while, I was like every other raver and collected just about every rave flyer I came across in my travels.  Some shows/parties I went to, others I'd promise myself that I'd go, but inevitably I'd forget or wouldn't be able to.  Before I thinned out the collection I had probably 500 flyers from all over the U.S. and Europe.  In addition to that, I've been on at least 6 or 7 different dance music forums, each with their own events sections since around 2004ish, and have seen dozens of examples of e-flyers.  So with that being said, I've seen many a flyer in my day.

This blog is a showcase for those unfortunate ones that have suffered from poor creative follow-through, whether through inexperience or just plain bad taste.  I'm no graphic designer, but it is a field that interests me.  One of the many rules I've heard about design is to keep it simple, both with text and graphics, because you're trying to make it easy for potential partygoers to understand the details of any given party.  When a flyer is a mess, it's doing a disservice to both the venue and the DJs involved.  Not to mention, it also makes the promoter look like he's skimping on something for his event, because with a shit flyer, good design is being sacrificed by putting out something cheesy--so what else is he trying to save money on?

Ultimately, when bad flyers come out, professional graphic designers look bad.  I know people who work in the field either professionally or as freelancers, and I've begun to feel their pain when I've seen horrible design over the years.  The availability of cracked versions of Photoshop, Illustrator, and other popular image manipulation software has given people the illusion that they know how to design things.  Hell, I've been guilty of it myself when I was doing small bits of promoting for different production crews I was a part of.  This is similar to people who think they rule at karaoke, so they think they should get a recording contract over people actually trained in music.  Maybe people don't realize it but there are some great designers out there, and sometimes, they won't charge a whole lot to give you a professional product.

So without further ado, here are the unfortunate flyers.