College Radio Days

I was going through old folders on my iBook tonight, looking for large files to get rid of, when I came across some fliers I had made for a few of my student radio shows while at Grand Valley State University.

Fair warning, this could get geeky.

My favorite part is the horrible clone brush job in the upper right hand corner

Ah yes. The Electric Challenge of the Powerslaves, a title that was not only a reference to the Go-Bots, but also Iron Maiden’s seminal 1984 album, Powerslave. Oh, here’s a live video of the title track. Better still, the entire background of the flier is the cover from Dio’s The Last in Line album. These fliers are a great time capsule of my Photoshop skills in college. I had probably only just learned the program at this point. Oy. I did this show with my buddy Erik.

The “premise” of this show, even if there was ever such a thing, was a combination of late night talk radio and music. All three of our listeners enjoyed it. In all seriousness, one of our friends commented that he enjoyed our varied musical tastes. Erik would play some Joy Division and I would follow it up with Iron Maiden. Hilarious.

Moving on.

This one was a bit better, look at all those images in the text!

Next up was Büllit Bëlt, my “old school” heavy metal show. This was a solo affair and a decent step in my Photoshop know-how. I had learned how to add images to text (and how to bevel/emboss said text). I seem to remember painstakingly cutting that flying V guitar and the ring of fire out of their respective original images. I also tracked down a Metallica font (called Pastor of Muppets, I believe) as well as an Iron Maiden font (Metal Lord?). For those curious, the images in the text are L to R: Eddie from Iron Maiden, the Motorhead logo, the cover of Dio’s Holy Diver and a Slayer album.

Next!

This is probably the best looking of the three, design wise.

Oh, Blades of Steel. My darling hockey talk show. Interestingly enough, it was a fairly landmark show at the time. WCKS was mainly music and a little bit of talk, but no one really did a sports show, let alone on hockey. They even did a story on me for the school paper. Obviously, this is just an ad for the Blades of Steel video game for the original Nintendo Entertainment System. I didn’t have to do much, which was probably a good thing, but I did change “game” in “the hottest game on ice” to “show.” That took some creative Photoshop work. I got the S, H and O from “hottest” but I had to swipe and flip the M from “game” to complete show. I was pretty happy with that.

Ah, college radio. Good times, good conversation (well, not really, except when Erik was around). Doing LansingNext with Julielyn is bringing back some of those memories and that is part of the reason I am enjoying the show so much (and like a million times more people are listening).