electric angel /design for life

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...]

a look at us working…

people are often intrigued to see where and how we work. well it’s something like this…

ok, so that was actually james and rebecca doing some colouring at the punch and judy puppets exhibition launch. and it seems they’re not the only ones:

we supplied an outline version of the cut-out-and-wear mask we drew for the exhibition poster – you can pop along to scarborough art gallery and colour your own in. or if you just want the mask already coloured for you you can download one from the museums trust website. oh – and there’s a puppet show in the gallery on saturday – details on the trust’s website or from the gallery (look out for another of our hand-drawn posters).

that’s the way to do it

who is this naughty chap creeping across our desk? why it’s mr punch! hello mr punch. what have you been doing today? ah, you’re inviting people to the new exhibition at scarborough art gallery. that’s nice. and what’s that you’re pointing at? an exhibition poster you can cut out a mr punch mask from. and it’s all hand-drawn. well done mr punch.

and how is judy? oh, she’s out shopping and you’re looking after the baby – but where is it? you’ve thrown the baby away? MR PUNCH!! i think i can hear the policeman coming…

showcase

series of postcards for exhibition and related events at yorkshire craft gallery. the work was all by bradford-based artists and curated by artworks creative communities – you can see an approach to using colour that we developed over time as part of the artworks ‘look’ and was later formalised as a key element in their new visual identity. other design work for the exhibition included large format posters, signage and the wall labels for the work on display which included the stories of the artists – which was really what the exhibition was about. all the images we used on the publicity material were from artists represented in the show.

scarborough literature festival …the long weekend

we were invited to design a new visual identity and promotional material for the 2008 festival after being recommend by an existing client and winning a competitive pitch. we took two starting points for a design concept that runs through all the material – the first was the lure of a relaxing weekend by the sea, settling down to hear the authors themselves rather than just reading a book, this led to the deckhair-book illustration. the second was inspiration from the paperbook format itself. thus the brochure is the same size as the first mass-market paperbacks and pays homage to their distinctive graphic style.

the conceit of holding a book and not just a programme followed through into the printing – we specified a coated thin card cover with uncoated interior pages to give the same feel as a paperback. colour-coding indicates the different days of the festival. additional information such as day ticket prices are designed as if real objects left on the page of the book.

having the programme as an ‘object’ has followed through to the flyers [pictured] and posters [in a library near you now] which advertise the festival as a book with the ‘rear cover’ announcing the authors involved. the unusual programme size meant we were able to use the offcuts from the cover to produce bookmarks as give-aways at local libraries. other design work includes banners and tickets.

from our perspective, enjoying working as a graphic designer is often about who we get to work with – so special mention to the enthusiastic staff at scarborough central library who run the festival as well as keep a thriving library and information centre running. you can read principal officer lee taylor’s perspective here on the bbc website – we’re grateful for the credit he gives us. the festival website can be found here. the festival runs from 17-20 april with authors including ian rankin, louis de bernieres and joanne harris.