Five years worth of Austrian club night posters from studio OrtnerSchinko

For the last five years Austria-based studio OrtnerSchinko has created posters for a monthly club night in the city of Linz. Over 50 posters have been created for The Future Sound but what’s striking about them is how cohesive they are as a series. The scattered text overlapped with photographs and graphics looks haphazard but all of the posters are based on a grid system. “The posters are a mix of exposed content on a really strict grid. For us it fits the genre of the club night because the sound is often experimental,” says Wolfgang Ortner, the head of design. “Often we cut the pictures and the typeface like music samples. The posters are modern, but we distort some element in a really simple way to create the right tension.”

Despite this grid being in place, Wolfgang feels the design isn’t too restrictive: “There are the same basic elements in every poster. But there are no rules beside the baseline and the vertical grid. You can change the size of the typeface, place the pictures in every size, cut the type and put the other design elements wherever you want, as long as it’s still grid-based.”

This disciplined way of designing may seem restrictive but in practical terms it really helped Wolfgang and the team in the early stages. “We needed an innovative design which could be done quickly because the budget was tight,” he explains. “The posters work because they don’t always look the same but they are recognisable have this Future Sound character to them, even if you change the colours.”

OrtnerSchinko felt the posters needed updating this year but were still keen to maintain the same framework. “This September we did a slight redesign and worked with Simon Walterer. It was getting boring as you can imagine, so we just adapted the concept a little bit and changed the typeface without losing the main style.”