I used to think concert posters were just, you know, posters.
Then I spent an afternoon in a cramped basement archive in San Francisco, flipping through stacks of original Fillmore posters from the 1960s, and something clicked. These weren’t advertisements—they were artifacts of a specific technological moment, when the limitations of letterpress printing actually forced designers to get weird. The ink sat thick on the paper, sometimes so heavy you could feel the ridges with your fingertips. Wes Wilson and his contemporaries weren’t choosing psychedelic colors and swirling typography because it looked cool (though it did)—they were working within the constraints of split-fountain inking techniques, where you could blend two colors on a single roller and get these unpredictable gradients that changed slightly with every print run.
Anyway, letterpress died pretty quickly once offset lithography got cheap enough. By the mid-1970s, most venues had switched over. The posters got cleaner, more controlled—you could reproduce photographs accurately, which meant less hand-drawn lettering and more, I guess, conventional design choices.
When Desktop Publishing Fundamentally Democratized the Entire Process in Ways Nobody Predicted
Here’s the thing: the real shift wasn’t analog to digital—it was who got to make posters in the first place. PageMaker launched in 1985, and suddenly every band with access to a Mac could design their own show announcements. I’ve seen examples from the late ’80s punk scene that are absolutely chaotic, layers of photocopied images and ransom-note typography that would’ve been impossible (or prohibitively expensive) to produce traditionally. The aesthetic got messier, more DIY, and honestly more interesting in a lot of ways. Print quality dropped—most of these were run off on copy machines at Kinko’s at 2 a.m.—but the energy was undeniable. Wait—maybe that’s romanticizing it. Some of them just looked bad. But the barrier to entry had collapsed, and that mattered more than polish.
Turn outs, the internet nearly killed the physical poster entirely.
The Digital-First Era Where Physical Posters Became Luxury Collectibles Instead of Functional Advertisements
By the early 2000s, most people found out about concerts online—through MySpace, then Facebook, then whatever algorithmic feed currently runs our lives. Venues still printed posters, but the function had shifted. They weren’t really advertising anymore; they were merchandise. Limited-edition screen prints by artists like Aesthetic Apparatus or Methane Studios, sold at the merch table for $30-50, numbered and signed. The production quality shot way up—these were art objects first, informational graphics second. Some shows would sell out online before a single physical poster got wheat-pasted to a telephone pole.
I guess it makes sense that we ended up here, in this weird hybrid moment where Instagram posts promote the show but people still line up to buy the commemorial print. The technology keeps changing—now AI can generate entire poster designs in seconds, and some smaller venues are experimenting with that—but there’s still something about ink on paper that digital files can’t quite replicate. Or maybe I’m just getting old and nostalgic for textures I never actually experienced firsthand, I don’t know.
How Contemporary Designers Navigate Between Algorithmic Distribution and Tactile Craft Heritage
The smartest designers working today seem to treat the digital and physical versions as separate but related objects. They’ll create a hyper-detailed illustration that works as a 1080×1080 Instagram post, then adapt it for screen printing with a limited color palette that references those old Fillmore posters—roughly 50-60 years later, give or take. It’s citational without being derivative, using historical techniques because they produce specific visual effects, not just for vintage aesthetics. Some of this work is genuinely beautiful. Some of it feels overly calculated, designed more for the ‘gram than for the street or the venue wall. The line between those two gets blurrier every year, and I’m not sure that’s entirely a bad thing—just different, reflecting how we actually discover and experience live music now versus how we did in 1967 or 1993 or whenever.
