electric angel /design for life

scarborough rocks!

poster and flyers for battle of the sands 09. the call has gone out for bands to take part in october of this year – last year’s winners – the excellent mum locked in castle – won a support slot with feeder at coastival. get your skates on as the deadline is 14th august. details at www.create.uk.net

we’ve designed the poster so that the call for entries section can be sliced off once the entry deadline has expired, thus saving print costs and paper by not needing two separate posters.

watch this space

we seem to be always popular with work placements, perhaps partly because so few design studios offer them (shame on you!). and we like to give our placements something fun and real to work on if we can.

recent 6th form placement sabina impressed us with her photography so we suggested working on a centrespread for the july/august issue of ‘scarboroughs future’ that encouraged people to look at possible future renaissance projects. these include the spa and surrounding area taking in the roundabout [possible future use as a surfers changing and shower area?] and controversial disused cliff lift, the far harbour area, the ‘argos building’ [space better put to use as a market square?] and the grand-daddy of them all – the futurist on the seafront.

sabina created this photomontage with the addition of our words and typography. it’s a little different to some of our previous scarborough-focussed projects in that we’re not trying to make scarborough look good, but rather encourage people to reimagine spaces and how they might be transformed.

for us this also hints at some future projects we have lined up in which we’ll be exploring space in scarborough and in one instance, helping the physical transformation of an area.

no angels

typographic treatments of three poems by kate evans from her poetry residency in palliative care settings in north yorkshire. the resulting work has been produced as a limited run of posters which will be framed and put on the walls of hospitals and hospices, and postcards which will be there for patients and visitors to keep if they wish. the project is arranged and funded by HAFNEY.

the balance here was between visual interest and legibility and all three designs came out of an intuitive approach – reading the poem and then responding to it. the aim is to enhance how the poem communicates. i started working like this long before i discovered poetry concrete although who knows what influences i absorbed back in the day that prompted me to take this approach. that said, a relationship between poet and designer like this seems quite rare and i’m grateful for kate’s trust in me which – worse case scenario – could completely ruin the mood of the poem.

it’s interesting how people interpret the designs differently. the layout of no angels [the blue design] was inspired by renaissance paintings of angels which often have a spray of light emanating from them which doubled as soundwaves from ‘the blare of the alarm’ in the poem. kate thought it was maybe based on angel’s wings. i like that ambiguity. eternity [the red design] started with kate’s suggestion that she envisaged the poem in a spiral. sometimes had the longest gestation eventually ending up as a much simpler layout than my initial scribbles which were more like the complex peasholm magic lantern images.

although given free reign on design, i had some self-imposed rules – solid colour and one font throughout. as well as finding restraints useful, this was also a rational design decision to tie the three poems together visually.

bawden & ravilious

tonight sees the opening of ‘east coasting: art & design by edward bawden & eric ravilious with mark hearld’ at scarborough art gallery.

we have designed the promotional material, information panels and artwork labels for the exhibition. we’ve also worked with the museum’s trust’s learning manager to produce a kids activity sheet. the leaflet-cum-poster-cum-invitation shown here was an example of how sometimes tight constraints produce creative thinking. scarborough museums trust wanted to make a noise about what looks to be a spectacular exhibition. posters were essential, leaflets were desirable and an invitation that felt a bit special would be nice too. but the budget would never extend to all three.

our suggestion was a leaflet that opened out to be a poster, some could be printed poster side only for where posters without folds were desired. we’d already seen some work by hark hearld, who has created ‘a miscellany’ for the exhibition [a room full of wonderful collected items] and so he was invited to produce lettering for a paper band that wraps around the leaflet to turn it into an invitation with a personal touch. these could be printed in house at the trust for very little cost. matching envelopes complete the effect.

our design was inspired by book covers designed by bawden and ravilious and to get an authentic look, was lettered largely by hand with a dip pen. if you look through a book or website of their design work you’ll be able to play ‘spot the lettering’ on our poster. the crab illustration is by edward bawden, the gulls by mark. with this kind of work, the aim is to pay homage rather than create a pastiche and i hope we got the balance right.

the feedback for this has been amazing and the gallery is expecting a bumper turnout tonight.
do try and get down to the exhibition – curated by lara goodband – which runs until 4th may. whether your taste is for design, illustration, fine art or english whimsy, you’ll find something to delight.

the electric angel gallery

there’s a little back story behind our new studio. when we decided that we would buy our own premises we had a wish list of ideal locations in scarborough. obviously some would never come on the market or be anywhere near our budget, but museum terrace was one of those places we said ‘if that ever comes up for sale…’. well it did, so we did.

another thing we said was that if we ended up with premises that had a public face that we’d love to run a little art gallery. well we did, and so we are. yes, it is possibly the smallest art gallery you’ve ever seen, but we’re going to enjoy exhibiting work by local creatives just because we like what they do.

we open to the public on friday as part of coastival – you can catch our first exhibiting artist – rachel welford – and myself on radio york friday morning talking about it along with other coastival peeps such as FEEDER.

shown here is the poster for rachel’s exhibition which doubles as the invite for the private view and to come have a peek at our new place. the invite slices off to form a more traditional poster.

the modular approach

quick post on a few more coastival designs. we consciously developed a modular approach to the poster and programme design so that we could create extra posters and banners from a collection of existing elements. this not only means it’s easier than designing from scratch each time, but also that the festival organisers know we can create new material for particular audiences quickly and cheaply whilst retaining a distinct house style for coastival. below are a full page magazine advert [first transpennine express explorer], roller banner stand, billboard banner and street banner all using this approach.

coastival poster

poster for coastival. C19th music hall posters were the inspiration for this – and for the centrespread of the coastival programme too. we took the same idea of displaying a wide range of acts/events on one long poster but in a more contemporary style.

it’s fun working with typography within a limited format like this because it’s about achieving visual hierarchy and thus steering the viewer visually through the design, not always in a straight top-to-bottom way [a lot of contemporary graphic design seems to take very minimal approach to this, usually at the cost of readability]. this is a balancing act with following some self-set ‘rules’ about typefaces that sometimes work against what you’re trying to do. the typeface issue is that music hall posters would use a diverse range of fonts to cope with long or short names on the poster – we felt this approach would have been too busy and too retro in this situation.

we’ve had some nice compliments on the poster and the programme design – thanks folks. i can feel a post coming on on the whole visual legibility thing as it’s often something that people have stated as to why they’ve chosen to work with us.

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.

acoustic gathering III

… is this sunday and has a pretty good relationship with the weather. so pack a picnic, cross those fingers and get down to the yorkshire coast’s most chilled free music festival. we will be. [image below - detail from this year's poster - an electric angel design. if you're wondering about the link between dragons and acoustic music you need to visit peasholm park where the festival takes place...]