The Edinburgh Art Festival asked me to design a card inviting people to join their newly-launched Commissioning Circle, a patrons scheme created to support the work of the festival. The festival sent me some examples of other patrons scheme invitations that they liked, along with a loose brief to design something with ‘minimal, bold text’ that would fit with the other printed material that I was designing, and to be printed on ‘high quality paper/card’.
After showing some early iterations that used the typeface Freight for the body text with Freight Sans for the titling, the festival expressed a preference for a more formal font, so I selected Garamond which I used with Active Grotesk Bold for the titling. These early iterations had full bleed images of EAF commissions on the front with a similar arrangement of type as the finished version, reversed out of the image, and mainly ranged left in the top left-hand corner. The arrangement of text on the back was a simple hierarchy of ranged left, ragged right type that aimed to break up what is quite a lot of information, in to understandable parts.
I started to think about the festival’s preference for a more formal typeface and how that formality might be expressed in the design on the front. The obvious solution was to centre the type, which, I think, always carries some connotations of formality as it echoes traditional book typography. The centred type didn't work very well with the selection of images that the festival had sent me – and they had also expressed reservations about using only one image to reflect the range of their commissions – so I started to think about a circle logo and how that might be used instead of an image.
I developed several iterations of the circle theme and it became clear that a circle reverse out of a colour would be the best solution: the festival had already expressed a preference for an uncoated card and I knew that a flat colour would work very well on this stock. I had been using Photoshop to pick out colours from the cover images to develop a colour for the back of the card that would create a link with the front: the sage green happened almost by accident and I knew that this was the prefect colour – fortunately, when I sent the next set of iterations, including other colour options, the festival agreed that the sage was the best option.
The design was completed with a second, smaller circle logo on the back of the card, which was offset to the left so that it echoed the ranged left typography on the reverse and also emphasised the information about the levels of support. The second circle was printed as a 25% tint of the colour on the front as it hindered reading of the text (which was printed black). The EAF logo was placed in the lower right-hand corner as a way of grounding the design and creating a sense of balance.
The card is 150 x 200 mm and was printed on Horizon Offset 350gsm by Allander in Edinburgh.
Sorcha Carey, Director, Edinburgh Art Festival: We have worked with James Brook on a number of different festival design projects since 2014, ranging from substantial exhibition catalogues, smaller interpretation booklets and leaflets, through to devising bespoke identities for discrete projects and initiatives. He has a wealth of knowledge of typography, graphic design, print and book production, is incredibly thoughtful and considered in his approach, and always responds to a brief with creativity and rigour in equal measure. I can’t recommend him highly enough.