SÓTANO 33 TWELVE POSTERSSÓTANO 33TWELVE POSTERSSÓTANO 33TWELVE POSTERS

Sótano 33 is a 120-person room at the bottom of a service stair on Doctor Vértiz. It books one band every Friday, and nothing on the street says it exists. The owners asked for a poster each week that would tell people on the Eje Central there was a show, and tell the people who had already been that it was this one.

Everything had to come out of the budget of a door charge of 180 pesos.

The shared riso at Taller Tinta Corrida holds two drums, so every sheet gets two inks and one pass. The booking usually firms up on Monday, which left about four hours of design and one afternoon on press for a run of 300.

A new idea every week was never going to happen. It had to be a system, and it had to be one the printer could set up without me if I was sick.

One drum carries the type. The band name always fills the sheet, and a variable font with a range of 50 to 150 on the width axis makes it fit: a long name goes tall and narrow, a short one goes flat and wide. That single move meant no band ever got a smaller name because of its spelling.

The other drum carries a drawing of what the band sounds like, made in under an hour from one geometric rule. Bars, rings, stairs, a sun. I stopped trying to illustrate the music and asked each band for one word instead.

A clear band at the top and bottom of every sheet holds the date and address, so those survive any overprint. Plates are allowed to drift on press. Nobody has ever complained, and several people have asked how it was done.