An Inn Complete Advertising Sampler

The following flyers were used to advertise the Inn Complete, the Graduate Student Club at Syracuse University, where I worked all four years of college. For the most part, they were done with a Rapidograph pen and black ink on cheap 8 1/2 x 11 copy paper. We had them copied at AlterActs, the student copy center, and distributed them to the various grad student offices. Since they were done in the golden days before Adobe Photoshop, they may not translate well into the rigid rectangles you're used to seeing on the web. But what the hell. I can still remember the first time I saw QuarkXpress. I was downstairs in the Schine Student Center, in the Grad Student Organization's office, and the hippie folk were putting together their alternative student newspaper, the Alternative Orange. They had just gotten their hands on a Macintosh IIci, and a full-scale external Radius grayscale monitor. Man, that was wealth. I'd used Letraset's Ready Set Go on a SE30, but nothing like that crazy Quark thing. I instantly resolved to become a professional desktop publishing mogul. Anyway, that didn't happen, but I managed to wreak my own private brand of havoc, almost entirely unsupervised, for four years. I did about 500 original flyers in that time, which, when you account for breaks and summer vacation comes out to almost three a week during the school year. Here are a few favorites.
	This is an animated version of a flyer I did where the Inn Complete logo turns into a buddha and back again. It was a takeoff on the popular "You always come back to the basics" J&B ads.
	This is just an ad for a darts tournament we held every year. And, no, it wasn't the Annual Michael F. Patton Leisure Sports Pentathlon. That was something completely different. I think it's a good example of my pen and ink technique.
	Here's one I liked, featuring a bit of Dada and Magritte influence. I think it went into one of the student magazines. I'd just bought a new paintbrush point watercolor marker, and had yet to find out that it produced illegible handwriting. But hey, this was supposed to be Surrealism, right? At least what I wrote was illegible rather than simply unintelligible.
	I had a spurt where I was doing lots of comic strip adverts, probably because I wasn't writing much and had to release my frustrations on something. Nobody I liked ever complained about there being too much to read.
	This is probably my favorite of them all. The idea was that grad students had this tremendous study load hanging over them all the time, and needed a place where they could take a break from it. I tried to jazz it up when I got Photoshop, but it works better as a line art drawing.
	I put this one together by asking some of the patrons to write "Inn Complete" in their native script, translating when necessary. OK, I cheated. I used a seven-language dictionary for the first seven, but the rest are really patron contributions. If anyone can figure out what language each entry is, I'll buy them a case of beer.
	This one was fun. We had just raised the price of our chicken wings from $.10 to $.15 each, and had to let everyone know so they could bring enough money. This was not a wealthy crowd, for the most part.
	I have no idea what I was smoking when I did this one. My best guess is that I wasn't smoking, and that the resultant hallucinations were caused by heavy nicotine fits.

I have no idea what the status of these puppies is as far as copyrights are concerned. If anyone ever sees these things and actually knows, fill me in. We never put any copyright statements on any of the stuff we did, nor did I even sign most of them. I guess if anyone wants to make a fuss, they can. I wouldn't put it past Chris McQueeny, my boss the last year I was there. If he's still there, and you see him, tell him he can go leap. Last thing I knew they were still re-using my illustrations, over a year after I left. Although they still aren't on the web, except as a mention in the proposed Drug and Alcohol Policy. Ha.