Psychedelic Sixties
- Fillmore poster
- acid poster
- Wes Wilson style
Melting hand lettering that fills every gap, in colours that vibrate against each other.
Opens an image model with the prompt in it. The price is on the page before you sign in.
What it is for
The psychedelic poster is the only style that treats illegibility as a feature. If you had to stand and work out what it said, you were the right audience.
The colour vibration is a real optical effect, not a metaphor. Two complementary colours of the same value make the edge between them shimmer.
How it works
Hand letter everything and let the letters swell, melt and stretch to fill every gap. No straight baselines and no empty space.
Choose complementary colours of equal value: orange with turquoise, magenta with lime. Avoid black entirely, because black kills the vibration.
Frame it with a symmetrical border of curling Art Nouveau forms and put a solarised high-contrast photograph in the middle.
When to use it
Use it for a rock gig, a festival, a 60s night, a record fair, a light show, a vintage market.
Leave it alone when anyone needs to read the address at a glance. It is unreadable by design.
Told apart from its neighbours
Art Nouveau is the direct source of the curves, but it keeps its lettering legible and its colours muted.
Rave and acid graphics of the 1990s use digital neon and smileys rather than hand-drawn melting type.
Op art shares the optical trick but is cold, precise and black and white.
- Art Nouveau
- Push Pin Studios
- Op Art
- Rave / Acid Graphics
Where it was used
Wes Wilson designed the Fillmore Auditorium bills for Bill Graham from 1966 and invented the melting lettering. Victor Moscoso, who had trained under Albers, brought the colour theory that makes them vibrate, and the Big Five in San Francisco printed the rest.
- Wes Wilson
- Victor Moscoso
- the Fillmore Auditorium
The prompt
Replace the blanks with your own event, keep the rest. Then run it on an image model.
poster for <event>, 1960s psychedelic Fillmore poster, hand-lettered type melting and swelling to fill every available space until it is barely legible, vibrating complementary colours of orange against turquoise and magenta against lime with no black, a symmetrical ornamental border of curling forms, a solarised high-contrast photograph at the centre, Art Nouveau curves throughout, <date, time and place> woven into the lettering
What goes wrong
The model returns clean type on a swirly background. Say the lettering itself melts and swells to fill every space, hand drawn, with no straight baselines.
The second failure is a dark palette. Ask for complementary colours of equal value and no black anywhere.
Leave out
empty space, legible clean type, muted colour, straight lines
Watch for
The vibration comes from equal-value complementary colours. One dark colour and the effect dies.
Questions
Print it
Pay for the one run. No subscription, and the price is on the model page before you sign in.
