What would an original piece of rave artwork be worth?

We were approached today by the original designer of some of the Eclipse, Coventry's artwork wanting to know what the original hand draw image might be worth.  We had no idea.  What do you think? The flyers can sell for £10 so would £50 be enough or £100 or is it just priceless?  Well we hope to be able to put a price on it soon as the designer may be looking to sell it and we will be offering it to you as soon as we get an interview and showcase of his other work up on the site.  It would be great to track down more of this sort of stuff!

Visual Energy by Simon Parkin now on Fantazia rave flyer dissertation

Thanks to Simon Parkin for giving us permission to reproduce his dissertation "Visual Energy" about how rave flyers influenced the acid house scene from the early days. Click the title link to read it the full piece.  Section 1 covers the origins and rise of the scene whilst section 2 is the one that deals the aspects of the flyers. With sections on piracy, visual sampling, technicolour, express your self and mind blown amongst others.

This is a great complimentary article to kick off our ever expanding rave flyer library with and it well worth a read.  Enjoy.

Follow Pez on Facebook and get insights from a rave artist legend

Just been looking at Pez the famous rave flyer artists page on Facebook.  Well worth checkout to get insights into the past and present of his rave designs.  Many companies including Helter Skelter and World Dance used Pez designs as the basis of their flyers.  Fantazia never did though.  Maybe one of our 20th anniversary bashes should feature a Pez, could we swap the current girl based designs?

View Pez's page on Facebook...

Do Women get offended by the imagery?

Along with a lot of the fashion, music, leisure industy we use pictures of sexy ladies in skimpy tight clothing to advertise our events and products. This start for Fantazia with the House Collection and House Collection Club Classics albums where each featured a girls posing or dancing on the cover, the series was a massive hit and we have continued using the same imagery for events as well since then. This includes the massive series of sellout events in Scotland as well.

Now clearly the albums sold and the event flyers attracted people (at least the men). But do women find this a turn off?

I think not, half the audience are female and half of them are dressed in a similiar way. Now maybe a squarer section of the society would disaprove, but they are most likely the ones that would not attend in anycase and we don't miss them.

What do you think?

So who designed flyers from the hardcore/rave days?

Fantazia had their own in house designer back in 1992 who did many of their classic flyers, Obsession similarly used some one they new and who was local to their home town of Cheltenham. Many of the other rave companies like Helterskelter, World Dance, Dreamscape, Raindance and more used either Junior Tomlin or Pez. If you click their names you can read interviews and profiles on both of them. Well worth checking out for a bit of scene history.

Current hardcore rave flyer designs

There is definitely a certain style to the present day rave/hardcore flyers. In 1992 Fantazia lead the way with computer generated graphics, like this one from the Second Sight. These days the look of hardcore flyers is very different.

The likes of Hardcore Heaven, HTID etc use a new style, bigger bolder text, with photos from the events. They seem very busy and the front image is either not prominent or secondary to the logo lettering. Things should change though and I like the look. If we still did the same old imagery it would be a back step and very unimaginative. Fantazia use a seperate style, similiar to the past but instead with the trademark (from the album series) girl picture. These are not stock shots either, but from photos shoots expensively styled and shot, which is why they don't look tacky like some other imitators who attempt to use the same format.