A quick squint at flickr with the key words “gig flyer” brings up some truly awful examples of the medium. True examples, if any were needed, to justify the phrase “just because you own [insert Adobe product name here] it doesn’t make you a designer”. However dig deeper and there are some gems; triumphs of layout, masters of colouring & illustrators extraordinaire. Above there is a wonderful example of a club flyer for a Luke Vibert show – cool because he’s one of my favourite electronic artists and after nearly 2 years of knowing someone I discovered Luke was his brother. The flyer features a hand drawn (modified) version of TheSerif in a heavy weight (correct me if I’m wrong) which works beautifully with the frankly bizarre illustration and other hand drawn elements. The light shade of sky blue and baby pink are always a winning combination.

This crazy illustration fascinates me – the text alignment around the image isn’t perfect but as far as grabbing my attention it works.

There are a number of bold colours over textured paper but this one really caught my attention by keeping to such a simple colour pallette. 

I’m really liking how the designer has taken something as overdone as “psychedelia” and not only made it feel really modern through the use of a lightning bolt motif but achieved a psychedelic piece with a limited colour pallette.

Running with the lightning bolt motif here again I really like the limited use of colour and the great use of white space.

This reminds my of illustrator Pete Fowlers Monsterism island without even drawing a monster! Again subtle use of colour and neat texture make this design a winner.

Alternatively this flyer relies on its use of anything but sublte colouring to achieve a great effect that immediately makes me think “festival time”.

Here just three colours are used to keep the message straight and to the point. 

More lightning bolts! I do like them so. The collage effect here also makes great use of white space.

This flyer perfectly represents production techniques of the time. A simple photo (a reference to the Smith’s own artwork) with a simple overlay of the details allowing for fast and cheap reproduction on any photo copier.

Really like the hand drawn type on this one especially as the construction lines are still visible.

This flyer is one of my own that I designed for my clubnight Flyswatter. It is two sided with further information on the back including venue information and a list of bands are played. It too has a subtle texture pattern applied which limits some of the vibrance of the colours.

 Another single colour print that allows for ease of reproduction. The flyer fits with Sonic Youths scrappy DIY sound and is representative of flyers from the scene.