Four bands, one night, five hundred yen

A crowd photograph copied until it's pure black and white. Across it, hand-lettered and crooked: FOUR BANDS ONE NIGHT. In a hand-drawn burst at the corner: 500 YEN. The bottom edge is torn.

Three facts and a photograph. That's the whole document.

What is the brief?

Get a date, a price and a feeling onto paper by tonight.

A flyer for a small hardcore show has one job and no budget. It has to be legible when stapled to a pole, cheap enough to make two hundred of, and it has to communicate that this will be loud. Every formal quality follows from those three constraints.

Nothing about it is styled. The style is what's left after the constraints.

Why is the price on it so prominently?

Because it's the argument.

Five hundred yen for four bands is the pitch — not the lineup, not the venue, the value. Small scenes run on the fact that turning up is cheaper than not bothering, and the flyers say so in the largest type available.

That's a good lesson for any design about an event: the practical detail is the emotional one. A date and a price are what make it real.

Why does the photograph get destroyed?

Because the copier does it and nobody stops it.

Run a photograph through a photocopier and the midtones collapse; run the copy through again and detail becomes blotches with halos. By the third generation it's a texture that reads as a crowd rather than a picture of one — which is more evocative, and free.

The important thing is that this is destructive rather than applied. A filter over a clean image reads as a filter; real degradation is uneven and eats things.

Does the hand lettering have to be bad?

It has to be fast, which usually looks bad.

Marker on paper, crooked baseline, letters compressed when the line runs out of room, a word squeezed above another because it was forgotten. A neat imitation reads as a typeface immediately and everybody can tell.

If a real hand isn't available, the letters at least need genuinely inconsistent weight and spacing — not a font pretending.

Can I use real bands?

Band names and logos are theirs, and hardcore logos are among the most distinctive graphics anywhere.

Small-scene bands are not less protected than large ones, and they tend to care more, because the logo is often the only asset. Photographs of crowds and performers are the photographer's.

Inventing the lineup is trivial and better. What matters is the format, not who's playing.

Does it work for something that isn't a gig?

Any event that is cheap, brief and mildly illegal-feeling.

A market stall. A film night. A protest. A car boot sale, treated with total gravity. The grammar — a count, a duration, a price — transfers directly, and applying it to something small is where the humour is.

For an event that actually happened, the flyer is a better souvenir than a photograph, because it's the thing that existed before it did.

Does it print well?

Better than almost anything — it's already pure black and white.

No midtones survive the copier, so there are none to lose. Blown-out blacks, torn edges, copier streaks and heavy hand lettering are all flat ink. The only thing to manage is coverage: a very large solid black area on a light garment wants breaking up by the degradation rather than sitting solid.

Newsprint grey, off-white and pale cement grounds. One ink. Black.

How do I get one made?

Describe the flyer at JustOG — how many acts, what it costs, and what the photograph is. Pick a direction, drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to order and shipped.

Designs other people have published are in the shop.

Five hundred yen. You are not going to find a reason not to go.