Getting My Hands Dirty with Punk Posters
So, I got this itch the other day. Felt like making something rough, something noisy. You know? Like those old punk flyers you’d see stapled to a telephone pole, all photocopied and messy. Decided to give it a shot myself, make some punk-style posters. Didn’t really have a grand plan, just wanted to dive in.
First thing, I just started grabbing stuff. Old magazines, newspapers, anything with interesting textures or big, bold text. Didn’t care much about what it was, just needed raw material. Got my scissors out, a glue stick – the cheap kind that gets all clumpy. Felt like being properly old school about it, you know? Forget fancy software for a minute.
Started chopping things up. Letters, faces, random blocks of text. Ripped edges felt better than clean cuts. Tried arranging things on blank paper. My first few attempts were just… bad. Like, really bad. Looked less ‘punk’ and more ‘kid’s art project gone wrong’. Everything was too spaced out, too polite.
This wasn’t working like I thought. It’s like trying to fix a leaky pipe with chewing gum. You know it’s wrong, but you keep trying anyway for a bit. I realized the problem wasn’t just the cutting and pasting. It needed that high-contrast, blown-out look. Like a tenth-generation photocopy.
So, I thought, alright, maybe digital isn’t completely evil here. Scanned some of my cut-up bits and some textures. Fired up some super basic image software – nothing fancy, mind you. Cranked the contrast way up, messed with the levels until things started looking harsh and grainy. That felt better. More like the real deal.
Then I started layering things digitally. Slapped text over images, images over text. Overlapped everything. Didn’t worry about things being readable, really. It’s the energy, right? Found some free fonts that looked jagged and uneven. Typed out some nonsense words, song titles I half-remembered. Scaled them up huge, distorted them a bit.
- Tried printing some out on my crappy home printer.
- Ran out of black ink almost immediately, of course.
- Printed some in weird colors just to see. Looked kinda cool, actually. Accidental success.
Then I took some of those printouts and went back to the physical stuff. Glued bits on top. Ripped the printouts themselves. Scanned those back in. Went back and forth a bit, digital, physical, digital again. Made a right mess of my desk. Glue everywhere. Paper scraps piling up.
Eventually, got a few designs that felt… right. They were messy. Loud. Probably wouldn’t win any design awards. But they had that raw feel I was chasing. You know, that feeling of just throwing something together because you had something to shout about, even if you didn’t know exactly what it was.
It was a bit chaotic, honestly. Like trying to assemble furniture with instructions in a language you don’t speak. You fumble around, things don’t fit, you get frustrated, maybe kick the thing. But sometimes, you end up with something that kinda works, even if it’s leaning a bit funny. That’s what making these posters felt like. Good fun, though. Good to just make noise sometimes.
