Rave and Acid Graphics

Rave flyers were made by people with a new computer and no design training, and the joy of that shows. Every effect in the menu is on the sheet because every effect was new.

They also had to work in a dark room and in somebody's pocket, so the neon on black is functional as well as loud.

Neon on black. Acid yellow, magenta and cyan, at full saturation, with nothing muted.

Warp the type: stretch it, bevel it in chrome, throw a hard drop shadow behind it, and use four or five typefaces at once with no hierarchy.

Add the period furniture: a smiley, airbrushed lightning, a fractal, a spiral vortex background. Cram the small print along the bottom edge on cheap glossy A5 card.

Use it for a 90s night, a rave revival, a club night, a student event, a warehouse party, a fundraiser with a dance floor.

Leave it alone when the audience is general. It reads as chaos to anybody outside the reference.

Drum and bass flyers from the same decade are darker, sharper and built on 3D and fractals rather than smileys.

Y2K chrome is later, cleaner and more corporate, with liquid metal instead of neon.

Vaporwave is a modern reconstruction of the same period, and is calm where this is frantic.

Fantazia, Raindance and Dreamscape printed hundreds of thousands of these between 1989 and 1994, handed out in car parks and record shops. The Museum of Youth Culture and the Flyer Archive have since collected them properly.

The model returns a tidy neon poster. Ask for four or five typefaces at once with no hierarchy, warped and bevelled, with a hard drop shadow.

The second failure is empty space. Say the sheet is full and the small print is crammed along the bottom edge.