My friend
Rich asked me if I could make a flyer for a show he was putting on last month. I was pretty busy working on some other stuff that day but I was still able to whip this out in about half an hour. It reminded me how much I enjoy making flyers, and how I haven't made any in a while:
It also got me thinking: No one really makes flyers for shows anymore. Sure, they might make some graphic that they can post up all over the internet, but gone are the days of stapling and taping physical paper copies of these things to street poles. I mean, it's a lot of work with pretty limited results, as far as I can tell. Still, I've always enjoyed making flyers so I thought I'd share a few that I've made over the years. Most of them are for my old band
DESA (yea, in case you are reading this and didn't notice, we're inactive. Go eat a sandwich or something...) but I'd be into making some of these for other bands out there.
I think that people who only make flyers in photoshop need to turn off the computer sometimes, break out the glue stick and scissors and go to town! As much as I like being able to use the shortcuts a computer has to offer, there's nothing like laying something out by hand.
While this flyer IS photoshop, the red layer is actually from a weird old-school copy machine that had a seperate red toner built into it! I had a lot of fun making flyers with that copier, I felt like the flyers were a little more special with that touch. We used this same weird anatomy mishap for a t-shirt design, although the swear word near the lower hand was changed to something slightly less offensive: OAKLAND.
Hey look, it's one of my robots! Oh no, he's been shot! I don't know why I bothered putting this flyer together in photoshop other than I wanted a chance to color this poor dead robot. I'll probably wind up using the illustration for something else at some point. Anybody want this robot on a t-shirt?
Originally I wanted to draw the entire band for this flyer, but I had a hard time finding good reference photos for the rest of the band. I also ran out of time. I still had a bunch of these flyers about an hour before the show, so I walked up and down Telegraph avenue taping them to poles and handing them to people.
I submitted this to
Facing New York when they had a t-shirt design contest. I submitted it late, which works out for me because they never used it, so I can still use the graphic someday! My wife really likes this design.
This was the original index page image for
Break This City, before it was a podcast. I wanted to start a site similar to
Buddyhead, but realized I wasn't as mean-spirited as them or motivated enough to update the site on a regular basis. I drew this with a black ball point pen on some really thin crappy paper.
So! Just putting it out there! Do you have a band? Need a new shirt design? A cool flyer/poster design for an awesome show? Hit me up, maybe I can help you out:
xadamdx@gmail.com