Drawing on the Future is a two-volume series that documents the Australian city’s underground music scene at the turn of the millennium.
It may be hard to believe, but it’s been 26 years since we entered a new millennium. And while it may feel like yesterday, the late 90s and early 2000s were a wildly different time for technology, dance, and graphic design.
Branding specialist and multi-disciplined designer Simon Wright takes a look back at this unique era in his latest book series. Drawing on the Future is a two-volume collection which brings together more than a decade of his design work for Perth’s underground rave and electronic music scene.
“It explores the typography, print techniques, visual experimentation and DIY culture that shaped the scene before social media existed,” Simon tells Creative Boom.
Documenting a bygone landscape where design work straddled digital and analogue tools, these collections offer fascinating insight into a lifestyle and work ethic that has long since transformed beyond recognition.
Unlike more conventional design retrospectives, Drawing on the Future is filled with Simon’s irreverent wit as he tracks his journey from university all the way through to designing flyers, posters, and other promotional ephemera for the underground dance scene.
Packed with dozens of drawings and logo mock-ups, its pages are a snapshot of an optimistic future that never quite materialised.
For readers of a certain age, the aesthetic will be all too recognisable. Pulpy comic-book illustrations sit alongside sleek, chromatic typography, capped off with overlaid compositions that showcase the Photoshop trends of the time. An explosive concoction, perhaps, but emblematic of the scene’s mood.
“It took around a year to put together all my old source files, scans and stories about the making of these artworks,” says Simon. “It’s an historical record of how the scene was at the time, how the flyers and artwork influenced – and were influenced in turn – by the music and the different sub-genres.”
Given the constraints of computer storage at the time, not to mention the sometimes precarious nature of digital archiving, the volume of work presented here is somewhat miraculous. Drawing on the Future is a group effort, pulling not only from Simon’s personal archive, but also the rave community itself.
This is even more notable when it comes to the iterations of brandmarks and flyers Simon has carefully presented. It would be so easy for these to be lost to time or the recycle bin, but here readers can learn about how they evolved as the tools and techniques are meticulously explained.
Even if you weren’t there to witness Perth’s rave scene at the time, there’s plenty to appreciate from a design perspective. As Simon explains: “I’ve also included unused concepts, sketches, ‘how they were made’ anecdotes and a few misremembered tales of those times.
“I wanted to create a collection that wasn’t just an archive of the many, many flyers,” Simon adds. “But also a bit of a historical context and a look into what was going through my brain at the time. How, why, what, when and where!”
