Nite Moves

Two problems

Nite Moves started with two problems:

Figure out how to DJ.
Make the best event flyers I possibly could.

This page is about the second one.

A recurring monthly dance party lives or dies on whether the flyer makes you want to be in the room. We had no media budget, no client, and nobody to answer to. Just a poster that had to do all the work, month after month, and earn a spot on somebody's feed against everything else in it.

So each flyer got treated like its own release. The rule underneath all of them: this is a celebration of the city, so the details have to reward the people who live here.

Nite Moves event artwork — Music from Winston-Salem, Test Pattern, August 26, DJs Erica Gilstrap and Kevin DeLury

Our first. Inspired by the motion picture soundtrack to Judgment Night.

The flyers

Each one riffs on something the audience already loves — a movie poster, a video game box, a comic. The job was to borrow that instant recognition, then hide enough local detail in it that people looked twice.

Nite Moves flyer — Dance Warriors, on Trade Street, October 27 costume dance party — Dance Warriors An adaptation of the Dream Warriors poster from A Nightmare on Elm Street 3. Our city mascot, Joe Camel, works his way in, because Winston-Salem is Camel City. "Smoke n' Joe" shows up across the whole run.

Nite Moves II The Revenge flyer — multiplayer dance party, November 11, DJs Kevin DeLury and Erica Gilstrap — Nite Moves II: The Revenge A note-for-note recreation of the Double Dragon II: The Revenge box art. They don't make NES art like this anymore. The costumes and the chaos match how wild the parties actually got.

Nite Moves flyer, March 2017 — Lucky Charms The St. Patrick's party. Nothing says almost-insultingly Irish like a box of Lucky Charms, so we rebuilt the box, General Mills logo and all, to read Winston-Salem. No detail was too small.

Nite Moves flyer, May 2017 — Super Mario Bros. Super Mario Bros., NES original. Look at the controller: it reads WSNC. Amanda turned us into sprites and dropped us into the Mushroom Kingdom. One of my favorites.

Nite Moves flyer, September 2017 — X-Men #141 X-Men #141, the Days of Future Past cover by John Byrne and Terry Austin. Amanda put our faces on it and swapped the fallen X-Men behind us for our own old flyers.

The tell

You can measure a flyer a lot of ways. Here's the one that mattered: people started asking for full-size prints to frame.

Nobody frames an ad. They frame something they want to keep. That's the whole result, and it's a better one than a click-through rate.

Nite Moves ended its run in 2023. Erica went on the road with her band, Feyleux. I had two kids. We called it a day. It was a run I'm proud of, and some of my favorite work I've ever made.