electric angel /design for life

don’t feed the animals

poster design for the stephen joseph theatre. the sjt asked if we could come up with an ‘edgy’ design that matched the content and feel of this play by their youth theatre.

set in a down-at-heel traveling circus, a gang of local ‘yoofs’ discover they might have more in common with the circus than they thought, perhaps even a shared future…

we’re often asked how we come up with ideas – it almost always starts with research into the subject, or in this case, reading the script from cover to cover. sometimes there are hours and hours of scribbles behind a design but this one arrived more or less as a fully-formed idea. one of the interesting things about projects close to home is you often hear feedback and it’s been really nice to have so many positive comments fed back to us on this one.

‘don’t feed the animals’ is part of the SJT reach out festival for which we also developed the logo and brochure as well as designing the poster for another festival production, ‘beachcomber’. you can still catch the latter today and tomorrow plus the end of festival band night at the weekend.

your place or mine

‘your place or mine’ is currently showing at scarborough art gallery and offers perspectives of the town by two different generations of artists. as with the previous exhibition, lines of conflict, there wasn’t any artwork complete to use in promotional material so camera in hand we set out to capture some of scarborough’s typography to represent different areas and demographics of the town.

the inside of the leaflet features text from two of the artists involved in the exhibition. we also designed interpretation panels for the show which using some of the photographs as drop capitals.

lines of conflict

scarborough museums trust came to us with a challenge – a forthcoming exhibition of sculpture on the theme of conflict but no images ready in time to use on the advance posters and exhibition guides – did we have any ideas? “hmm,” we replied, “what if we create the title of the exhibition with sculptural type that reflects the theme…”

a few days later i’m with the always unfazed don french showing a design and explaining i want it to look as if it’s a rusted shard of a shell casing. don has already invited in a sheet metal worker for the conversation who believes he has the perfect material – an old water tank. “we can cut it back to front so all the molten metal drips through. it’ll look really rough and messy.” “brilliant!” i reply.

a week later photographer tony bartholomew and i are teetering on a cliff edge with a hunk of metal and wood trying to get exactly the right sort of clouds behind our type sculpture before we’re blown out to sea, but we’re struggling to get the right angle. tony peers over the edge. we decide that the ledge of crumbling cliff below will support the weight of a photographer long enough to get the shot…

lines of conflict opens this evening at scarborough art gallery.

look at me, look at me

although designers like to imagine that their work exists in a world of perfect white walls perhaps with the occasional bulldog clip, in reality our work is out there in the world competing for attention with everything else. respect isn’t guaranteed… i’ve seen our work hung upside down, part-covered with other posters, used to mix cement on and once as part of a firing range. everyone’s a critic. but it’s still a thrill when your own work unexpectedly catches your eye.

it’s not a great photo but i snapped this wall of posters featuring two of our designs (or 5 if you count the 4 bubblecar variations) at the ferens gallery in hull. as well as being quietly pleased that the posters we designed were holding their own against the competition, mostly i just loved the colourful chaos of imagery.

bubble car pop art

give-away postcards created for the exhibition ‘inspired by warhol’ which accompanies the andy warhol exhibition at the ferens gallery in hull.

the gallery sent us a photo of their bmw isetta bubble car which is paying the gallery a visit from the hull streetlife museum and asked if we could do something with it. these large format postcards (and a series of matching posters) were the result. call in to the ferens gallery and pick up a set while you can!

acoustic gathering – the official end of summer

for several years now the end of summer in scarborough has been widely acknowledged as – if not officially marked by – acoustic gathering in peasholm park.

we’ve designed this wonderful outdoor music festival’s posters, programmes and t-shirts since its first year. each year we take inspiration from the unique setting of peasholm park with its faux oriental pagoda and dragon boats which feature on the poster and flyers again for 2012.

this year sees AG take another big step forward in having a saturday evening performance (with headliners the lightening seeds) in addition to the usual sunday all-dayer. it’s also ticketed this year and you can get hold of some via www.acousticgathering.co.uk. tickets will be available on the gate while they’re available.

big pink cow

poster for the forthcoming andy warhol artists rooms exhibition at the ferens gallery in hull.

we’re working on a whole range of marketing material for this exhibition with the future ferens group plus kids activity sheets, a timeline, banners and more. so you can expect plenty more of the lovely cow on this blog, plus some info as to how we worked with the future ferens to develop design ideas and choose this image.

a little bit of warhol trivia for you – in 1966 andy printed wallpaper of this cow in pink & yellow and covered a whole room with it at the leo castelli gallery. although as far as we know, it’s not currently available at B&Q. but you wish it was, don’t you?

digital scarborough 2012

digital scarborough is back – this saturday at woodend from 2pm. it’s great to see the event return, this year with a strong business focus to the daytime followed by a glorious fun packed evening of music – it’s not just for techies & geeks!

keynote speaker is ajaz ahmed, founder of freeserve, including opportunity for an informal chat with the man over coffee. there’s work on display by an emerging generation of digital creatives and i’ve been asked to be on the ‘ask an expert’ panel. so come and along and judge if i’m actually worthy of such a lofty billing… i’ll also be percussioning in the evening as part of everyone’s favourite dada-inspired freeform funk collective, the jawline of julianne moore. busy day! full info at: www.digital-scarborough.co.uk

oh yeah, the organisers asked us to design a poster, so here it is.

having a rather splendid day

today we’re all at coastival: www.coastival.com
(website developed in partnership with sneakytrick)

to the lighthouse

we didn’t manage to blog this at the time, although it’s lovely that people are still mentioning the design. taking cue’s from literary history and continuing to evoke sense of place [the lure of a long weekend in scarborough is an integral part of marketing the festival] this identity from 2011 helped the festival consolidate it’s place on the literary calendar.