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Ever since the emergence of electronic dance music (EDM) clubs, club nights, and festivals in the 1980s, their intensely ephemeral and experiential qualities have both been signalled and savoured by means of a distinctive graphic imagery. Flyers, posters, and more recently websites, videos, animated GIFs, and image-messaging apps like Snapchat are used to communicate information about the DJ line-up and venue coordinates, but, just as importantly, to convey visual cues about the sub-genres of music, the types of drugs, and style preferences to be found in a particular venue on a particular night, as well as the likely age and gender, and sexual and ethnic identities or proclivities of the attendees.

Within the space of few short hours the graphic ephemera created for EDM clubs transmutes from promotional tools that anticipate the excitement of a night into souvenirs of nights past. As such, they are one of the most extreme manifestations of the high turnover, fast-rate preoccupations and styles of urban existence, and one of the most fleeting of formats in the already intrinsically transient medium of graphic design. In a closely enmeshed intertextual relationship with their youth or subcultural milieus, club promotional graphics feed from, and flow into, related forms of creative expression such as music packaging and videos, video games, festival and concert graphics, fashion, and the editorial design of style magazines or niche-culture zines. Over time, they provide an index of the changing tastes in music and style, shifting attitudes and social mores, as well as the subtle differences between national, regional, and subcultural identities at any given period

Developing a visual language for house and techno

EDM comprises variants such as trance, drum and bass, garage, electroclash, trip-hop, breakcore, and dubstep, but its DNA is found in two of its most significant genres: house and techno. House music originated in the early 1980s in Chicago’s post-disco gay and African American underground dance-club culture. Here DJs and producers, like Frankie Knuckles and Ron Hardy used newly available technology such as samplers, mixers, drum machines, and synthesizers (especially the Roland TB-303 bass synthesizer and the Korg Poly-61 synthesizer) to manipulate disco tracks, to give them a more driving mechanical beat and deeper basslines, and to mix in other sounds like soulful gospel diva samples and piano riffs. Chicago DJ Jesse Saunders’ 1984 hit “On and On” is typical of this hybrid sound, with its minimal vocals and bassline sampled from Player One’s 1979 disco record Space Invaders.

Graphic announcements for these early house music parties, which took place at venues such as Chicago’s Warehouse and the Power Plant, were raw, often using local commercial job printers’ template designs for concerts and sports events and employing the relatively cheap split duct printing method (where the person on the press pours two different coloured inks at each end of the ink well, which then, as the rollers revolve, spreads the colours in the middle to achieve rainbow gradients).[1] The clubs were members-only and served juice and soda rather than alcohol, although most clubbers took amphetamines or LSD to sustain twenty-four-hour jacking marathons.

Meanwhile, in the basements and warehouses of Detroit, the techno genre was developing as an offshoot of Chicago house music. Detroit DJs such as Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson, and Derrick May (also known as the Belleville Three after the school where they met) popularized a less vocal and more aggressive, cerebrally complex, percussive industrial sound that referenced the avant-garde sci-fi aesthetic of European synth bands like Kraftwerk and Art of Noise. The scene took shape around Transmat Records and the label’s release of tracks such as “Nude Photo” and “Strings of Life,” and the so-called “Back to Basics” Saturday club nights at the Music Institute, with its earnest logo, styled as a university crest, perhaps to reinforce these DJs’ self-identification as the ‘black intelligentsia’ of dance music, and membership cards in black, gold, and platinum. For the most part, the Detroit techno graphics echoed the dark and technological qualities of the music and the slogan “hard music from a hard city” (the battle cry found on the liner notes of records by one of the most sonically aggressive of the Detroit DJ crews, Underground Resistance (UR)) with industrial imagery and a monochrome palette.

But while Chicago and Detroit generated much of the music, it was in the United Kingdom that these genres found explosive success in the late 1980s, through a unique combination of skilled DJs, the availability of MDMA, commonly known as ecstasy, willing audiences hungry for the escapism and tribe-like bonding of uninhibited communal dancing, and the evolution of a witty and exuberant style of graphic promotion. Together these created the unprecedentedly fertile conditions for the creation of what Cynthia Rose has termed “leisure enacted as event.”[2] For many, the moment when the disparate inspirational threads of the house music dance scene came together into what would become a globally exportable and graphically recognizable leisure event, occurred at around 4 a.m. one night in late August 1987 in a club called Amnesia on the Spanish island of Ibiza. On an open-air dance floor, four holidaying British DJs danced to Argentinian-born Alfredo Fiorito’s eclectic set that mixed disco, new wave, Argentinian tango, and even unfashionable white British acts like Kate Bush, Queen, and U2 with Chicago house-label record imprints like DJ International and Trax. Johnny Walker, one of the DJs in attendance (who would go on to be a resident at London’s Spectrum club night) observed how Fiorito would “play two copies of [Farley Keith’s] ‘House Nation’ which he’d cut up and stretch out, then play a George Michael track.”[3]

With Walker were Paul Oakenfold, Danny Rampling, and Nicky Holloway. Holloway recalled what was different and particular about this occasion: “We all tried ecstasy for the first time together, and then the whole thing made sense […] Half an hour or so after you necked a pill you would suddenly feel this euphoric wave go through you, and you suddenly felt that everything in the world was all right.”[4] More than this, the London DJs were struck with what they perceived to be an almost religious atmosphere, where the crowd’s devotion to the DJ, on a raised platform, and compassion for one another, were palpable. Back at their hotel they deconstructed a tape recording of the set, and attempted to source the Chicago house and alternative Balearic records they had just heard at Amnesia. They returned to London “literally wearing the T-shirts and holding the flyers” and within five months, Oakenfold started Spectrum, Holloway started the Trip, and Rampling started Shoom. The name of the latter was an onomatopoeic approximation of the surging feeling of coming up; its graphic identifier the yellow smiley face became the widely adopted mascot for the acid house craze.

The designer of Shoom’s logo, flyers, and interior banners was George Georgiou, already well-known through his work for other London clubs such as RAW and Sin. Rampling, who had seen the designer Barnzley at the Wag Club one night wearing a T-shirt covered in smiley faces, specified that this image should be part of the look for his new Southwark club. Georgiou embedded the face into the second “O” of the hand-drawn lettering for Shoom, and for the flyer, gave it vacant eyes and dimension so that it suggested the form of an ecstasy pill, a likeness reinforced by its repetition, tumbling down each side of the flyer. The symbol swept like a virus across the country, erupting as the Day-Glo pattern du jour on “acid teds’” garb such as bandanas, beads, and dungarees, and used as a stamp on many of the pills themselves.

At the same time in the UK, early EDM parties and orbital raves were being advertised on pirate radio stations and via recorded telephone messages. As the phenomenon became more mainstream they began to be advertised in listings sections in magazines and on Teletext. By the early 1990s the flyer had taken precedence as the means of communication. Reduced to its most basic elements, a flyer combines its data—the name of the venue or phone number, opening hours, and DJs—with a slogan and provocative imagery or abstract visual patterns. The flyer, designed in the space of a few hours, printed in runs of several thousand, and distributed by mail, in stores, and by hand after the clubs closed, became the ideal means to communicate the practical details and attitudinal sensibility of future club nights.

Sampling and mixing

Since a night would comprise several DJs each playing a whole range of music, a flyer designer would rarely attempt to directly evoke the music. The connection to music came in the means of production. In graphic design techniques, one can find some visual equivalencies to the construction of electronic music and the craft of the DJ. House producers sampled beats and breaks, advertising jingles, and melodic motifs and collaged them in patterns to make a track. This compositional manoeuvre can be compared to the graphic technique of sourcing and the cutting and pasting of logos, photographs, text, and clip art, in a way that draws attention to, rather than attempting to disguise, the method of its construction.

Sampling, according to cultural historian Ulrich Lehmann, is the “means by which technology enters into the very core of the artwork.”[5] The British graphic designer Ian Andersen described the irreverence of visual and conceptual sampling as being “motivated by the same interests and desires as people who sample music; it’s taking stuff you like and using it your own way.”[6] The sampling and collocation of disparate images and text fragments, arranged side by side in unresolved juxtaposition on a flyer, created a temporal and referential complexity in club graphics, which engaged readers, as they attempted to decode or reconcile the instability of its meaning, either by pinning it down according to remembered experiences, or by interpreting it through their own sets of associations, desires and aspirations.

Mixing—the DJ’s primary activity of melding separate records into a continuous stream of new sound using a mixer connected to two turntables—also finds a visual equivalent in the design of club graphics. Before Mac computers became widely available, designers used photocopiers and photographic reproduction techniques to merge and manipulate images. Computer software like Adobe Photoshop, which appeared in the late 1980s, enabled the distortion of images and typefaces as well as their blurring and blending. As the DJ, producer, and flyer designer Leo Elstob put it, “Just as I love to hear jazz next to techno or disco or dub reggae, in a musical collage, I love the idea of mixing old TV sets, Indian drawings, graffiti tags and Macintosh doodles together to form one, visually.”[7]

Through these techniques of sampling and mixing, flyer designers attempted to convey through their subject matter and style the quality of escapism that a clubber might expect, often using overt visual metaphors such as passports and airplanes. As Fiona Cartledge, founder of London’s Sign of the Times store, which sold clubbing accessories and designer of novelty flyers that included a plastic toy nurse’s case for a “Disco Hospital” night, has observed, the role of the flyer was to give an indication of the “tone of the event.” Andrea Diamond, who designed several flyers for Rare Groove (a term coined by DJ Norman Jay to describe obscure American jazz and soul from the late 1970s and early 1980s) events in the early 1990s said, “Usually you wouldn’t get more than a name and a few details. Or something like, ‘it should look rough’, but as the scene expanded, design got a lot more competitive. Soon how your ticket looked was the guarantee–or not—of a quality rave.”[8]

Just as the main body of house music fragmented into multiple sub-niches, so its graphic representations also became increasingly specialized in the 1990s, with the need for particular visual languages to communicate the nuances of each genre. In the UK these included the twisted cartoon characters and pastiches of the commercial vocabulary of mass consumption that encapsulated acid house in the early 1990s, the gritty urban textures of grime in the early 2000s, or the dystopian post-apocalyptic fractals of the contemporary gabber resurgence.

The internal organ-shuddering aural frequencies and repetitive 4:4 beat at the 140-bpm-pace of deep techno, as experienced on dance floors in the UK, were approximated by a similarly earnest, futuristic, and technologically inspired visual language of glyphs and glitches, repeated horizontal lines and motifs, and Mac-enabled liquid typography in a tonal palette of grey and silver, derived directly from what the American designer April Greiman once termed the information “texture” of the computer.[9] The Sheffield-based design studio Designers Republic, founded by Ian Anderson and Nick Phillips, were major proponents of this cerebral, layered, and overtly technological style, as evidenced in their designs for Warp Records and its stable of electronic music artists such as Autechre, Speedjack, and Pop Will Eat Itself, and clubs such as Republic and Gatecrasher. They processed reference material, ranging from Japanese manga to science fiction and corporate logos, through a technologically and semantically self-aware filter that pushed at the edges of communication and legibility.

Designers responsible for communicating the perky upbeat tempos and soaring vocals of house music that was only really fully and bodily appreciated in the states of euphoria, heightened sensations, and feelings of empathy facilitated by psychoactive drugs, found their source material in historical visual encapsulations of pleasure and connectivity. House graphics channelled the LSD-infused psychedelic graphics of the West Coast American countercultural music scene that had evolved in the 1960s in the work of artists such as Wes Wilson, Victor Moscoso, and Stanley Mouse. They took the pulsating neon letterforms, the all-seeing eye pyramids, the warped and melting rainbows of lightshows and tie-dyes, and the flowers, yin-yang motifs, hearts, and fragments of Buddhist imagery processed through kaleidoscopic prisms, but they also tapped into the sensibility of pop art with their ironic co-option of the brash visual language of brands and consumer culture. The Fairy Liquid baby, Kellog’s Rice Krispies’ Snap, Crackle and Pop, and animated M&Ms were all grabbed from supermarket shelves and repurposed as the cute, tongue-in-cheek cheerleaders of 1990s clubland. Favoured sources for appropriation were cleaning products, detergents, and fruit and candy wrappers with their exaggerated promises of cleanliness, freshness, and juiciness, as well as characters and scenes from retro comic strips and popular TV programmes with their messages of wholesome fun.

House music’s media-remixes stemmed from a generational sensibility that was savvy to the manipulative mechanisms of the marketplace but still in thrall of its power; they poked fun, winked, and knowingly nodded, but didn’t critique. They made their own promises of pleasure, sex, and an intensity of experience not found in the routines of everyday life, an escape from school, boring jobs, or unemployment. Flyers sold addictive consumer behaviour just as much as the advertisements and products they parodied. They helped sell tickets to clubs, to lifestyles, and sold records, drugs, and clothes; they were the visual currency of an intricate system of club promoters, musicians, and DJs, all of which revolved around the continuous desire for increased levels of serotonin and dopamine.

Curiously there was even a secondary market in flyers among school-age children, who may not have attended the events, but collected, traded, and even purchased notable examples of the genre and pasted them onto their bedroom walls, as aspirational signifiers; and thus the flyers were even grooming them as future consumers of club experiences.

Two of the quintessential but disturbing tropes of club graphics, which were often combined, were the objectification of women and a celebration of infantilism. Women’s naked and semi-naked bodies or disembodied mouths simulating fellatio on bananas and candy bars, emblazoned a large majority of club posters and flyers, in blatant testimony to the male-dominated nature of the clubbing world and its misogynist tendencies. This sophomoric conception of the female form and female desire in the “tacky babe flyers” was reinforced by the equally common occurrence of regressive juvenile-referencing imagery.[10] Drug-induced movement disorders such as “gurning” were offset in clubs by chewing on pacifiers, candy necklaces, and ice-pops. These accessories were frequently represented graphically along with a cornucopia of cherubs, babies, toys, dolls, and rosy-cheeked toddlers, bespeaking the reality of post-drug impotence and a base kind of sentimentalism.

Club flyers as consumerist currency

EDM club graphics have always been implicitly and often explicitly commercial. Some flyers made reference to a lineage of self-consciously lo-fi DIY and punk graphics through use of hand-drawn lettering, Letraset, or words torn and pasted ransom-note style, or to the visual expression of the political ideals of socialist realism, say, or art movements such as Russian constructivism. For the most part, however, their reference base, mode of production, and reception took place firmly within the framework of late-capitalist consumer culture.

In some political regimes, the individual self-expression and hedonism of clubbing is still considered genuinely subversive, and in the United States, because EDM wasn’t picked up by commercial radio stations and major labels, clubbing was framed “alternative” and a form of underground resistance. But in the UK at least, house music’s anti-authoritarian rebelliousness, as expressed by its graphics, was at most ambivalent and ironic; and even these impulses were rapidly absorbed into the dominant culture as clubbing became an increasingly regulated leisure activity and normalized in the popular imagination.

The club and rave scene did find a countercultural voice in the UK—or at least a voice was found for the genres, as raves became effectively criminalized by part V of the 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act. This attempt to curb the proliferation of rave culture banned gatherings “on land in the open air of 100 or more persons at which amplified music is played during the night (with or without intermissions) and is such as, by reason of its loudness and duration and the time at which it is played, is likely to cause serious distress to the inhabitants of the locality.” In what would become a near-infamous act of definition, the Bill defined “music” as that which “includes sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats.” In protest, a collective of ravers and civil rights groups united under the Advance Party, and organized a series of demonstrations in central London in 1994, in the face of increasing police presence.

But, for the most part, club promoters, DJs, drug dealers, and flyer designers were all Thatcher’s “self-made” men and women and, as Tony Colston-Hayter, organizer of one of the first big commercial warehouse raves at Wembley Studios in London, under the name “Apocalypse Now,” put it: “Maggie should be proud of us: we’re a product of enterprise culture.”[11]

As The Designers Republic’s Ian Andersen has remarked, “Consumerism is an interesting game to play […] and there is that sense of piracy, that sense of ‘fuck you, if you want to ram your logo down my throat.’”[12] Indeed, The Designers Republic even developed a fictional brand with which to sell their own products—the phonetically expletive Pho Ku Corporation —with taglines such as “Buy Nothing, Pay Now” and “Work, Buy, Consume, Die” as both a commentary on, and yet still an integral part of, this fatalistic sensibility.

Most of the early flyer designers were amateurs; not in the sense that they were autonomous within the constraints of capitalism, but rather in that they had not studied graphic design as a discipline, did not self-identify as professional designers, were often improvising with available technologies, and there was no real division between the times and spaces of their work and leisure—they were part of the audience for the work they created. Andersen, for example, studied philosophy and worked as a music manager, then segueing into design via the flyers he designed for his bands. “At first The Designers Republic was me enjoying mucking around with Letraset, cutting it up, playing around with letter shapes,” he explained, echoing many other similar stories of flyer designers learning on the job.[13]

Art direction often took place in improvised verbal exchanges. The illustrator Dave Little, for example, recalled DJ and club promoter Gary Haizeman briefing him in 1985 for a flyer for Spectrum his new Acid night at Heaven, by saying, “Geordie, I want a fuck-off all-seeing eye in the middle with the words Spectrum and Heaven on Earth around it.” Little said he “guessed instantly what he wanted. I had just bought a hardback called The Art of Rock featuring Rick Griffin’s work for the Grateful Dead which was the perfect inspiration for it. I added the words ‘Theatre of Madness’ from Tom Wolfe’s Kool-Aid Acid Test and incorporated these into a Grateful Dead-style border.”[14] For professionally trained designers, like Ian “Swifty” Swift, who studied graphic design at Manchester Polytechnic and had worked at the Face and Arena and in Neville Brody’s studio, and who designed flyers for Rare Groove nights such as “That’s How it Is” and “Talkin’ Loud” in the early 1990s in London, the design of flyers was “a phase to go through to get your name out there. To do design work quickly.”[15] Or as, Paul Cummings, a designer for the Haçienda, put it even more succinctly, all you had to do was, “Turn on, put down, bureau out!”[16]

As the clubbing enterprise became a slicker and more mass-market operation in the mid-1990s, the emergence of super clubs and super DJs demanded the creation of super identities. When the founders of Liverpool-based club Cream engaged Mark Farrow’s design studio to create an identity with which to brand their global expansion around 1993, Rob Petrie applied the strategies of corporate branding: “The brief was pretty loose but I remember Darren [Hughes] saying something like make it look ‘classic like the Nike logo.’”[17] Influenced by Japanese car manufacturers’ marques such as Toyota and Mitsubishi, where the logo is constructed of three interlocking elements that create the unified whole, Petrie used three drops that referenced the club’s name in a quasi-mystical construction which also echoes the Yin Yang symbol. It rolled out across the full spectrum of Cream merchandise, club projections, and advertising; rendered in three-dimensional sculptural forms made out of rubber, chrome, flowers, and leather, for example; it reached the finals of the BBC Design Awards in 1996, and is still in use almost thirty years later.

When London’s Renaissance nightclub, a competitor to Cream, approached Petrie, who was then in partnership with Phil Sims at design studio Dolphin, the designers eschewed the industrial or cartoony visual tropes that had begun to dominate club culture and turned to the natural world instead, using eggs, butterflies, flowers, and leaves for the club’s campaign. This unexpected use of natural imagery to promote the chemically induced highs and industrial sounds of the clubbing world has continued to drive a more thoughtful variant of club promotional design. Perhaps this impulse began with Peter Saville’s postmodern appropriation of a romantic 1890 Henri Fantin-Latour still life of flowers for the 1983 New Order album Power, Corruption & Lies. In 1990, Julien Morey, who worked with Saville, designed an arresting poster for the Haçienda’s Monday night “Halluçienda,” using a neon backlit image of a grain of marigold pollen massively enlarged using scanning electron microscopy. In a more recent, but similarly considered and pared-back, series of posters for the Ministry of Sound, the creative agency Haw-lin, who acknowledged turning to both The Designers Republic and Peter Saville for inspiration, also used striking abstract imagery of microscopic plant life.

Graphic identities and campaigns for clubs and dance music festivals have continued to get ever more sophisticated, with notable examples including Village Green’s collaged visuals for the London club Fabric, which referenced folk art and surrealism, and Base Design’s illustration-based identity for the Swiss Paleo festival.

The end of the flyer?

While flyers were the central graphic tender of the dance music community in the 1980s and 1990s, today they have become outmoded with the rise of the Internet and the prevalence of social media sites like Facebook. In a global electronic music industry worth 7.1 billion dollars in 2016, and with top DJs like Calvin Harris earning 48.5 million dollars annually, it is the DJs themselves who have become the new corporations, with their own design teams to handle the smooth application of their branding across merchandise, music packaging, and festival appearances.[18] Some, such as deadmau5, Daft Punk, and Marshmello, the latter with his custom-made identity-disguising marshmallow helmet, bodily inhabit their mediagenic visual brands.

Meanwhile clubs all over the world are closing. In the UK in 2005 there were 3,144 clubs but ten years later there were only 1,733, a fact The Economist attributes to the rise in dance music festivals and that fewer people are taking MDMA.[19] But there are other factors as well—such as availability of personalized Spotify playlists giving easy access to music that you used to only be exposed to in clubs. Most people find out about the clubs, club nights, and festivals they want to attend via their social media networks, and particularly image and story messaging apps like Instagram and Snapchat.

Since it’s estimated 82 per cent of internet communications will be video-based by 2021, this creates a new market for distinctive graphic backdrops against which clubbers can pose for photo and video selfies.[20] The incredibly elaborate custom-made stages and sets, light shows, and firework displays of electronic music festivals such as Horst, with the pavilion design by Assemble, or Tomorrowland in the town of Boom in Belgium draw hundreds of thousands of people and resemble temporary theme parks. Tomorrowland’s 2017 incarnation, titled “Amoricum Spectaculum,” attracted 400,000 attendees and 1,000 DJs spread across sixty stages, and despite the cutting-edge technology used to create its onsite visual pyrotechnics,

Indeed, it seems likely, now that original dance music-promotion design is threatened by, on the one hand, formulaic online template software such as Adobe Spark and Canva, and, on the other, by punter-produced social media imagery, that such nostalgic impulses will only continue. Today’s designers of club graphics, in the multiple formats they now inhabit, might find that the most inspiring source for their own sampling and mixing is in the globally dispersed archive of palm-sized wafers of print and ink—the lo-fi, humorous, and emotionally resonant 1980s- and 1990s rave and house flyers.