The Bangs flyer
The precursor to the American pop rock group the Bangles were The Bangs. The lead singer Susanna Hoffs designed this flyer for the band in 1982 while they still used that name. The flyer is done using Letraset transfer type and some scotch tape, with a couple of lines of text set on a typewriter. The whole flyer has many charming quirks that are only possible with transfer type. The uneven spacing and the shifting baseline are hallmarks common in music flyers of the 1980s, many of which were done in the same hand-made manner. The collage and transfer type composition allowed for easy xerox copying once the flyer was complete, liberating it from the need for a typesetter. Letraset type was fragile and not always perfect when rubbed down, with characters sometimes breaking. The B in the band’s name looks like it is upside down or could be made up of pieces of other letters. The 1 in 21, in the last date, is upside down (compare with the other 1s above).
