← Atlas · Topics: inspiration, typography-and-styles
Rave Preservation Project
- Type
- gallery
- Verdict
- Niche
- Licence
- Look only licence, not stated
not-statedFree to browse, funded by donations and paid directory listings for businesses. Public flyer pages are open and the galleries need a free sign-in. No licence, copyright notice or usage terms for the scans were found on the reviewed pages. - Agent channels
- none
- Pricing
- free
- Reviewed
What it is
The Rave Preservation Project collects and scans paper ephemera from rave, club and underground dance events. At review its home page gave about 40,000 digitised flyers, posters and tickets in more than 2,400 galleries, organised by country, region and city, with California and London the largest sets. The project was started in 2013 by Matthew and Tani Johnson and runs on donations.
When to open it
Open it when a brief asks for acid graphics, rave or club-flyer energy and you want the printed originals rather than today's templates: how a real flyer set its date, venue and line-up around a central graphic, and which colours and type treatments a scene actually used.
Most useful
- Home: a showcase of flyers with event details, plus the gallery counts by place. The site's own banner, seen at review, sets a chrome-lettered title over psychedelic rainbow stripes beside a TV test card, under a flat orange header.
- Galleries by city: after the free sign-in, a city's galleries show how one scene's flyers changed from year to year, which is a better guide to the look than a single famous flyer.
Using it with agents
No agent channel at review. The galleries sit behind a free sign-in, and creating an account is for a person to do, so an agent should work from the public pages or from flyer URLs the user supplies. Describe the type treatment and colour structure you want in your own words.
Watch out for
- No licence or usage terms were stated at review, and each flyer belongs to its original designer or promoter. Treat everything as look-only.
- Most galleries need a free account; the public pages show only a small part of the collection. Individual flyers were not inspected at review, because they sit behind that sign-in.
- The "Directory to the Underground" beside the archive sells listings to clubs, DJs and shops to fund digitisation, so some home-page space is paid promotion.
- Print flyers use fluorescent inks and tiny type that do not survive a screen. Keep the facts of an event in plain, legible text and let only the display graphics carry the distortion.
Reusable ideas
- Organise an archive by place first, so a reader sees one scene's visual language develop over time.
- Put event facts, such as date, venue and line-up, beside each scan, so the image and the information stay separate.
- Show the collection's size and the digitisation backlog openly, which makes the gaps in the record visible.