Vera is a club with a rich history that has been around since 1974, featuring concerts, movies and dance nights. Before that it was a sorority, but as the years passed the members became more and more politically active and organized lectures, poetry nights and jazz-concerts. After a few years the members voted for a direction towards live-music. Peter Weening initiated this change and nowadays still works as our mainstage promoter.

A lot of bands that later became famous first played here. To name a few: Joy Division, U2, The White Stripes, Sonic Youth, Nirvana, Franz Ferdinand, Editors and many, many more.
Vera has two halls: the main hall (capacity 500) and a smaller one (cap. 80) in the former vaults (dating from the 15th century). Vera mostly relies on the effort of the 220 volunteers. They work in a great variety of groups such as Photography, Bartending, Sound, Light and of course the Art-Division!

The concert posters of the Vera Club exist since the 80ties due to a group of always changing, enthusiastic young designers. The posters are screen printed in the attic of the club that locates a small graphic studio. Besides screen printing the studio also locates facilities where the famous Vera Krant is produced. This little club magazine is made with the help of a small semi-automatic offset machine and always full of colourful illustrations.

The Vera posters are unique pieces of art, printed in a run of maximum 70 pieces, which makes them true collector’s items. The prints are often peeled from the walls even before the concerts even started. At the moment the Vera Club has 11 poster designers that print a little over one poster a month.

Kunny van der Ploeg and Mirjam Dijkema of Groningen based collective Studio Frontaal, have both been working for the Vera Club for several years as poster designers. Their shared passion for authentic design methods -such as collage, drawing, letterpress and screen printing- brought them together collaborating on several projects. ‘The work we make for Vera, is feeding our more regular design work. We have so much freedom in creating the posters; legibility is the only requirement. Therefor the Vera club is a dream client; we explore, associate freely on themes and songs and band names and experiment with several illustrative methods. That’s how we stay fresh and inspired. It’s wonderful making your hands dirty with ink, not staring at a screen the whole day. The hand made aspect makes it very personal and gives it an immediate originality. We strive to continue this in all the work we produce; it should be authentic, surprising and personal.

Kunny van der Ploeg (1980) studied Graphic Design and Illustration at Academie Minerva in Groningen and got a scholarship to study at Edinburgh College of Art to get her Masters Degree in Graphic Design. Ever since 2004 she works as an independent graphic designer for a broad variety of clients.