Flyers (and demos)
Before I start with my story about flyers I like to explain first what flyers are. Flyers are pieces of paper that contain at least 3 main parts: a date, a name and an address. Flyers are made to tell people there is an event in a club or an event in open air. During the years the black and white flyers changed to the colourful flyers of today time. At first the flyers were somewhat underground and hard to find. In today’s world you can’t walk in the city without seeing a flyer.
At first you might think: what is the relation between collecting flyers and demos? Well, the relation is the resulting piece of art. Both demos as well as flyers are considered special when the designers/composers of the flyer/demo can come up with something special, something not done before.
My hobby of collecting flyers started about the same time as when I got interested in watching demos. Is that a coincidence? I believe there is something behind it.
It was somewhere in the early 90s that I started collecting flyers from big party events is Holland. During the years I collected 1,000s of flyers of which some are real pieces of art and are really beautiful.
Flyers are most of the time made up of a normal piece of paper, but sometimes the designers of the flyer make up a flyer of something very different. All kinds of tools have been used in the past to make attention to an event. There have been flyers made up from cigarette-boxes with the information of the event instead of the normal texts from the cigarette-companies. Also some genius printed the event-info on a 10”-vinyl to get special attention. In today's world you have to be inventive to get special attention to an event. There are many events organised around the world but before the event takes place how can the customer find out were he has to go? There are people that only visit a party because they like to see/hear some certain dj but there are also people that are attracted to big events or nice flyers.
In a city like Amsterdam you can get about 50 different flyers every 2 weeks but most of the flyers are just ordinary flyers. About 5% of the flyers are different, have something special. The things that make a flyer special can be the design of the flyers, the size of the flyer, the material used for the flyer, etc. With demos this is also the case: there are very few demos that stand out but nevertheless it is still interesting also the not so great demos too. Also the not superb-demos have most of the time something special: they have great music or great graphics or great programming skills at the background of the demo.
For the organizers of a big event, flyers are very important to tell the people that there will be a party. Of course the organizers could make commercials for radio and/or television but for most organizers the costs of such advertisement are too high. Flyers will cost money too, but are relatively cheap compared to commercials in television.
In the late 90s more and more party-organizers did not only make a "normal”" flyer but, also an e-flyer or digiflyer: an advertisement of an event inside a Macromedia Shockwave/Flash-file or an executable or a website specially dedicated to a party-event. Another possibility can be to make a cd with on this cd the information of the party inside a game or simply an executable that starts a slideshow/advertisement someone can see at their computers at home.
This is where the relation to demos should become apparent: as more and more party-organizers use e-flyers, isn't this a nice opportunity to make a fantastic demo to advertise a party (like the invitations to demo-parties) and at the same time inform the general public about demos?
For demogroups who like to get more attention or like to earn some money with making demos, I would certainly advise to contact a big party-organization - like ID&T in Holland. I am almost certain that when you show these guys what your demogroup has made in the past they are convinced that you can also make some nice things for them. You can not only make an e-flyer that is not only better in quality and original, but also possibly cheaper for them too. It is a win-win situation in my opinion.
PS: If you collect (rave/party)-flyers yourself, or know someone who does, please contact me at funnyproffy2@hotmail.com.
I've been collecting flyers for more than 10 years now and still am fascinated by these pieces of art (just like demos fascinate me).
Links to some e-flyers/digiflyers:
home.tiscali.be/nomax/DATA/FILES/DFTHDM99.ZIP
www.clubpromos.co.uk/hardhouseacademy/eflyer.html
impulz.udc.nl/digiflyer/digiflyer.php
www.mastersofhardcore.com/mohvshell/ ...
Comment from Adok: It's yet another funny coincidence that this article gets published in the very same issue as DiamonDie's article about "The Strange Attraction".