electric angel /design for life

crazy, damn right i’m crazy

the title comes from a t-shirt slogan by artist ross sinclair, appropriated for this exhibition at the ferens gallery, hull. the exhibition is curated by the ferens art ambassadors – a group of young people aged 18-25, the work selected from the arts council collection featuring works by the likes of tracy emin, david hockney, joseph beuys and david shrigley.

the project started with coffee and a chat with some of the team behind the exhibition – timing from concept to delivery of print was tight so this was the only real chance to genuinely understand the motivation behind the exhibition and the works chosen for exhibit. the main aim was to break down some barriers between this supposedly high-culture thing called ‘art’ and to get people not just looking, but thinking.

after a range of sketched ideas this booklet was chosen – quite a departure from the usual gallery publicity. for starters it’s a 12-page booklet rather than a flyer or leaflet, it encourages the reader to interact by adding to the illustrations inside – each based on an artwork from the exhibition – and it’s day-glo orange. the photos here don’t really do justice to how bright these are.

this is a job that also called our copywriting skills into play. taking some of the artworks as a starting point, we developed them into the ‘activities’ in the booklet, writing the copy and providing the introduction to the exhibition – a distillation of that chat over coffee. the art ambassadors gave feedback on the initial design suggesting some rewordings and with thumbs up from the ferens and the arts council we were able to make the deadline with the booklets and posters ready for use at events promoting the exhibition. print is by scarborough-based adverset.

the exhibition opening night is this friday. we’ve also designed exhibition graphics, banners etc for inside the gallery so plenty more on this one to blog…

beverley literature festival

yes, it’s been over a week since we last blogged – but we have been busy and as a result will have lots to blog, plus some exciting news about electric angel hq.

now then…
beverley literature festival kicks off tomorrow with an enticing collection of authors and activities. we’ve designed the festival brochure, posters and display material and i think it’s one of those jobs where i’ll explain what we did and why…

something we decided very early on with electric angel was that we would define our design priorities anew for each job and that there would never be any overarching ambition to develop a recognisable studio house-style [although some people say we do have one], be fashionable or serve any other purpose. in some ways this goes against popular theory that to initially develop a reputation as a designer you need a distinctive style.

with beverley literature festival our priorities were worked out with the festival’s director – good communication and ease-of-use being the overriding priorities for the brochure.

the design uses clear roman and sans serif fonts with good contrast combined with slightly more anarchic hand-written headings. we’ve striven to achieve a logical easy-to-read layout. the dates alternate in colour so that the diary page, the programme and the booking form all correlate. we consciously broke with page numbering tradition so that the first page of the programme section was page 1 even though not a ‘right hand’ page, but then because our brochure opens upwards rather than outwards we felt that let us off the hook. and we had a reason anyway.

oh, and the reason for the that upwards opening was to get the diary page as a complete vertical list alongside the map for easy reference.

the decision to use two colours came after looking at promotional material from a range of literature festivals which were rather generic. we decided that a limited colour palette would lend beverley a distinctive style – colour is all too often used just for decoration. the choice of paper type – slightly rough cartridge paper style stock – was also part of communicating a sense of authenticity.

the illustrations are created from photos taken by james – we created bold stamp-like images in which the letter ‘B’ keeps appearing. as well as being playful they help to sell part of the attraction of beverley literature festival which had been neglected in recent years, namely spending some time in this charming yorkshire wolds town. bear illustration by children’s author lydia monks – appearing at this year’s festival.

the booking form is positioned as the centre pages of the brochure making it easy to remove without destroying any vital information. it’s also designed to pop straight into a DL window envelope with the return address showing in the window.