The quiet death of the club flyer
The best graphic design of the 90s was made to be thrown away. An elegy for print promotion, from someone who kept the shoebox.
There is a shoebox in my flat containing roughly three hundred club flyers from 1994 to 2003, and it is worth more to me than most of my records. Not financially — although the flyer market is real now, with dealers and grading and everything — but as evidence. This is what nights out looked like before they were content.
The flyer was a design brief with perfect constraints: one image, seen for two seconds, in a hand or on a wet pavement, that had to communicate exactly what kind of night this was and who it was for. The results were some of the best applied graphic design of their era, made by people who were mostly not called designers and paid mostly in guest list.
“This is what nights out looked like before they were content.”
The event graphic still exists, of course — as a square, sized for a feed, A/B tested into the same three templates as every other city's squares. It reaches more people than the flyer ever did and it is impossible to keep in a shoebox. Both of those facts are true and only one of them will matter in thirty years.