DIY Art is a series of activity packs from EAF and selected artists, inviting people to get creative at home. The instructional creativity kits give insights into an artist’s practice, showing how to use their processes and techniques to create unique artworks. Here is the latest pack that I have designed with Holly Yeoman of the Community Engagement team at Edinburgh Art Festival, this one was created by Louise K Fraser, a neurodivergent teaching artist and educator based in Edinburgh. Louise works across Scotland collaborating, co-creating, devising and delivering imaginative and original participatory workshops. The other packs that I have designed were created by artist Alexa Hare, artist and illustrator Sofia Niazi, artist and educator Naomi Garriock, artist Peter Liversidge, and artists Pester & Rossi. The packs can be downloaded
here.
Drawing: Explore and Expand is Edinburgh Art Festival’s first home creativity kit made with, and for, people with visual impairment, it was devised by Louise K Fraser in consultation with visually impaired artists Anne Dignan, Kasia Jakimczuk and Alan McIntyre. Together the artists worked through how materials and new techniques could be explored by visually impaired people in a home creativity kit. Through three sections, Drawing: Explore and Expand supports building confidence in materials, style, composition and ideas.
The design of this pack follows the design of the previous activity packs but with some differences that make it accessible to visually impaired people; following guidelines and feedback from the artists involved, I adapted the design to suit these needs. One of the major changes was that the pack needed to be downloadable as a Word document so that users could have the option to increase the type size (or change it completely) to suit their needs – as Metallophile Sp8 (the typeface used on the other packs) is not freely available, I typeset the document in Century Gothic, which closely resembles the basic structure of Metallophile but is available on most computers. Century Gothic has a taller x-height than Metallophile as well as a clarity of letterforms and distinct differences between characters – the document is typeset at 16 points so, even without scaling, it should be comfortable for readers with visual impairment.
Following consultation with the artists, we added some design elements that guide the user to the three different sections of the activity, with clear indications of how much time each section would take and with different sections highlighted in one of three colours. We also added image descriptions for Louise’s illustrations that are presented throughout the pack. It has been very interesting to learn more about the needs of people with visual impairment and how these needs can be assisted through design features – any future packs will build on what we have learned in this project.
As well as a download, Louise created a pack that included her home-made wax crayons as well as the tools, paper, pencils and tape that are used in the activities. These are all housed in a cardboard box with a printed version of the kit – I designed a DIY Art sticker to go on the box that brings everything together with the DIY Art logo branding.
Image credit: Edinburgh Art Festival
Holly Yeoman, Community Engagement Manager, Edinburgh Art Festival: I have been working with James since 2020 to develop Edinburgh Art Festival’s DIY Art home creativity kit series, which through their strong identity, visual appeal and easy-to-use format, designed by James, have supported us to introduce artist’s practice and process to audiences, helping us to maintain and grow our audience through the challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic. I always look forward to working with James.
