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
