Manipulate Festival 2024 Posters

This is a series of posters that I designed for Manipulate 2024, Edinburgh’s international festival of animated film, puppetry and visual theatre, bringing the very best of international and Scottish work to audiences across Edinburgh and beyond, in February each year. This is the second time that I have worked with Manipulate Arts, the organiser of the festival, and I am delighted to see my designs on posters all around Edinburgh. 

The posters are part of a wider identity that I have designed for Manipulate 2024 that has been adapted across a suite of marketing and promotion items including a programme guide, posters of various sizes, advertisements, digital posters, vinyls, and a ‘takeover’ of The Skinny website. There are three poster designs using three key images from performances from the festival along with a general text only poster.

The starting point for the identity was an animation of the Manipulate Festival logo created by Jamie Macdonald that was commissioned by Manipulate Arts to announce the festival. Taking inspiration from Jamie’s animation, and working with him to create new neon assets in a carefully edited palette of colours, I created a series of cohesive designs that placed Jamie’s glowing neon Manipulate logo over the chosen images on a subtly glowing background along with glowing neon squiggles taken from the general Manipulate Arts identity. 

It’s always a pleasure to see posters designed on a screen as objects in the real world, but this year has had an unexpected pleasure: when the Manipulate posters are seen alongside posters from Pink, Cher, JLS and Bowie, it looks like our colour palette of purple, pink and cyan has (inadvertently) captured the zeitgeist!

Find out more about the festival here: www.manipulatearts.co.uk/festival

 

Click here to see the posters that I designed for Manipulate Festival 2023.

Alberta Whittle: create dangerously

Alberta Whittle: create dangerously

Designed by James Brook for National Galleries Scotland, Edinburgh, 2023

This is an identity I designed for the exhibition Alberta Whittle: create dangerously at Modern One, National Galleries of Scotland, the largest showing of the artist’s work to date. The exhibition included digital collages, watercolours and new paintings and was an opportunity to see the artist’s tapestry, Entanglement is more than blood, and film installation, Lagareh – The Last Born, which the artist presented at the Venice Biennale in 2022, commissioned by Scotland+Venice.

The A0 poster was the starting point for the identity and is based on brand guidelines developed by DNCO, a branding agency based in London and New York. I was asked to develop three possible routes for the design using the new logo, brand colourways and bespoke typeface, Caslon Doric NGS. This was the first time that the branding had been put in to action and formed part of the National Galleries of Scotland major rebrand for 2023, which went live at the end of March, just before this exhibition opened. 

Working closely with the NGS marketing team, the curators of the exhibition, and the artist and her gallery, I developed and refined three design approaches, eventually settling on one featuring the visually arresting still taken from the artist’s film, Lagareh – The Last Born as the lead image (this was my favourite image and the strongest of the set of images I was given to work with, so I was delighted everyone got on board with it).

Once the design of the poster had been finalised I adapted the design to fit the other elements of the brief: a totem (free-standing signage board), 800mm wide x 1510mm high; a private view invitation; and a roadside hoarding, 17,600mm wide x 1220mm high. The posters, hoarding and totems were produced by large format digital print and signage specialists Mackinnon Slater in Edinburgh, and I was very grateful to Colin Mackinnon for his help and advice during the production of the assets, especially the hoarding which is possibly the widest item I have ever designed!