The result is a cover that borrows its cobbled-together aesthetic from D.C. hardcore.

With oversight from the magazine’s Gail Bichler and Kimberly Sutherland, illustrator Matt Dorfman assembled the black-and-white design, which depicts Kentucky Senator Rand Paul as a punk-rock figure clutching a mic. The headline? “Major Threat.” (It’s not intended as a reference to that ill-advised Nike campaign of the same name.)

The rock imagery makes more sense when you read the story’s lede, which quotes ex-MTV VJ and prominent libertarian Kennedy comparing lib leaders to ’90s grunge bands. To Kennedy, Ron Paul is Nirvana, Rand Paul is Pearl Jam, and Ted Cruz is—wah wah—Stone Temple Pilots.

Not that Rand Paul is supposed to closely symbolize either Eddie Vedder or Ian MacKaye. “I don’t know if it can be taken that literally,” says Bichler, the magazine’s art director. Her department wanted to appropriate the language of D.C. hardcore in order to “give the sense that Republicans could make use of [libertarians’] oppositional, youthful energy.” The piece’s Washington link made it seem like a natural choice. “We thought because it’s a D.C.-based story, we wanted to play off the language of D.C. hardcore,” Bichler says.

Dorfman didn’t take shortcuts trying to punk up the visual. Cribbing inspiration from a 1980s Fugazi poster and a Dead Boys poster from the late ’70s, Dorfman made most of the cover by hand with help from a Xerox machine, Bichler says. Then he added details like tape marks and text punched out on a typewriter. In the lower left corner, the cover reads “ALL AGES” and “11/8/16”—the date of the next presidential election. (Don’t let that give you ideas, kiddos; you still can’t vote till you’re 18. Though some libertarians would like to change that.)

When Dorfman brought his drafts back to the team, Bichler and Sutherland advised him to keep it real. “He would show it to us, and sometimes our input would be, ‘Make it look worse! It’s not quite crappy enough,'” the art director says.

But while the design crew did a swell job making the cover as distinctly crappy as possible, there’s another key element that’s subtle by comparison. It’s the little anarchy symbol tucked away in the magazine’s nameplate. Bichler says she had to run that one up the chain first. “Anytime you touch the logo, it’s a little bit touchy,” she says. Ultimately, it got approval from the Times higher-ups.

Bichler calls the circle-A her favorite component of the design. “We were trying to make an editorial point,” she says, “and it definitely makes it more authentic with that.”

This post has been corrected to reflect that Matt Dorfman designed the cover himself with art direction from Gail Bichler and Kimberly Sutherland.

But while most music fans could pick a bad poster out of a lineup, what about a great one?

When I pose that question to John P. Boilard, the producer of the touring National Poster Retrospecticus, he says—much like all art—there are no real criteria for an awesome gig poster. “Oh man, that’s totally subjective,” he writes in an email. “It’s great when an artist captures the spirit or the essence of a band, event, production, city or venue. Sometimes that stuff doesn’t have to matter at all, though.”

In D.C., there’s a distinct tradition of poster-making—particularly in the realm of go-go, whose golden era spawned some of the most recognizable concert posters in the city. D.C. punk, meanwhile, has its own flyer tradition. But those promotional tools—regardless of their sentimental or historical value today—weren’t necessarily prized for their beauty at the time. If a punk flyer was cheap to make and fit all the pertinent information, and a go-go poster was big, bold, and easy to spot across a busy road, that was enough.

The posters in Boilard’s third edition of the National Poster Retrospecticus, which comes to D.C.’s Hole in the Sky Friday night, are easier to love for their artistic merits.

The one-night show celebrates the poster art of more than 100 established and up-and-coming artists. They live all over the country, and make their posters using a variety of different printing techniques.

Some of the artists in the show earn money doing non-poster work, but a “good percentage” make posters for a living, Boilard says. How is that possible in a time when artists and venues have turned to cheaper online avenues for promotion? He suspects that the Internet has actually helped poster design thrive. “At the end of the day those Internet postings will get even more traction if there’s an awesome poster associated with it,” he says.

Technology has also changed poster design itself as more artists have picked up digital illustration. But even if many gig posters aren’t designed by hand, Boilard says, they’re often still printed the old-fashioned way. “Either way a poster design gets created, it’s the actual printing process that brings in that sense of tradition,” he says. “Screen printing and letterpress printing equipment have certainly been tweaked for even better results over the years, but the end product is pretty much the same as back in the day: beautiful layers of ink on paper and unique prints—often printed by the hands of a human being.”

So if a poster’s greatness is entirely subjective, is there at least some special goal concert posters should aim to achieve? Perhaps. Boilard says it’s about a combination of the artistic and the practical. “As long as a person is sincere about what they’re making, and the poster helps spread the word about the show,” he says, “then I’d say it’s a successful poster.”

Below, check out a slideshow of some of the posters in the National Poster Retrospecticus.

The National Poster Retrospecticus is on view May 16 from 7 p.m. to 11 p.m. at Hole in the Sky. $5 donation requested.