Manipulate Festival Lanyards

Here are some lanyards that I designed for Manipulate Festival 2025 which starts today, Wednesday 12 February. Go Team Manipulate!

Manipulate Festival 2025

Here are the posters that form part of an identity that I designed for Manipulate Festival 2025, 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. This is the third time that I have worked with Manipulate Arts, the organiser of the festival. It is always exciting to spot the posters as they appear around Edinburgh in the run-up to the festival.

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Manipulate Festival 2025 Assets

Here are some of the other assets that I designed for the Manipulate Festival 2025 including digital screen posters, vinyls, and press advertisements, showing how the original design was adapted for different formats, sizes and shapes and for different types of information.

Manipulate Festival 2025 Programme

This is the Manipulate Festival 2025 programme guide which uses a variation of the design of the poster (see previous posts) as a front cover, alongside a gradient background taken from the poster design with colours from Yifei Xiang’s illustration. In order to fit a lot of information in a small space, the typography sets up a hierarchy of information for the various events of the festival including use of symbols to indicate wheelchair access etc. The programme guide is 8 pages, double gatefold, folded to A5, it is printed on an uncoated paper. 

Work in progress for Friends of the French Institute

I have been working on a leaflet and other printed items for the Friends of the Institut français d’Écosse. Based in Edinburgh, the charity was formed twenty-five years ago to support and promote the deep ties between Scotland and France. Drawn from across Scotland and run by a management committee which meets regularly, their aim is to raise funds on behalf of the French Institute. 

As part of the design work that I have been undertaking, I have updated and digitised the Friends logo – which was originally designed by Dalrymple – to include the additional word d’Écosse. The original logo was typeset in Caslon Doric but I have re-typeset it in Founders Grotesk, a more freely available typeface. For the leaflet, I selected Minion Pro as a complementary typeface to be used alongside Founders Grotesk.

www.amisifecosse.org.uk

Manipulate Festival 2025 Posters

Above is a poster that forms part of an identity that I designed for Manipulate Festival 2025, 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. This is the third time that I have worked with Manipulate Arts, the organiser of the festival. 

At the initial briefing for the design, I was told that the festival – like many arts organisations in the current climate – was working on a very tight budget and that there was limited money to spend on marketing material. I suggested various ways that the organisation could save money, including working within the template and layout that I designed for the previous year’s posters rather than developing a whole new design.

Unlike in previous years, when the design featured different images from festival performances across a series of posters, this iteration used a single key image. The festival commissioned an illustrator, Yifei Xiang, to produce an illustration to encapsulate the ideas and themes behind the festival. I collaborated with the illustrator from an early stage to make sure that the format of the illustration fitted the template that I had set up.

Working with a palette of colours taken from Yifei’s illustration I developed a design for the poster that used a coloured gradient background that connected to the gradients that appear in the illustrator’s work. I faded the illustration in to the background colour with the Manipulate Festival logo layered over the top as in the previous year’s poster. 

The layout and design of the poster was then adapted for other marketing material that I designed, including: a printed programme guide; press advertisements; posters of different sizes and shapes; and digital assets. I am pleased to say that this rational approach to designing the marketing material, working with the illustrator at the commissioning stage, and using the basic template from the previous year, meant that the design of the marketing material came within budget, yet still produced a distinct suite of materials to showcase the festival.

Design Process for Manipulate Festival 2025 Posters

I was delighted to be asked again to design posters and marketing material for Manipulate 2025, Edinburgh’s international festival of animated film, puppetry and visual theatre. This is the third year that I have designed for the festival, working with the new marketing manager Graham Webster and the team at Manipulate Arts. At the initial briefing, I was told that the festival, like many arts organisations in the current climate, is working on a very tight budget and that there was limited money to spend on marketing material. I suggested some ways that the organisation could save money, including working within the template and layout that I designed for the previous year’s posters rather than developing a whole new design.

Above is the graphic information (in black only) that appeared on the layout of the posters for the 2024 edition of the festival. For the final printed posters (below), the Manipulate Festival logo along with squiggles taken from the Manipulate Arts identity were given a glowing neon treatment by Jamie Macdonald and presented on top of three different images of performances from the festival to create a series of posters that appeared all over Edinburgh.

The team at Manipulate decided that the 2025 iteration of the festival poster would include less information on it than the previous one – the list of performers was removed, for example – and there would only be one version rather than the multiple versions of previous years. Below is a mock-up of the poster with the reduced information in place showing how it gives much more space for a key image. 

As with the previous iteration of the poster I proposed that the image (as represented below by the white square) should fade in to a background colour behind the Manipulate logo to create a layered dynamism in the layout.

 

This year the festival decided not to use images from the festival but instead commissioned an illustrator, Yifei Xiang, to produce an illustration to encapsulate the ideas and themes behind the festival. The image below shows one of Yifei’s previous images in situ on the poster layout.

I suggested that it would save time and money if the commissioned illustration fitted the format of the layout of the poster rather than re-designing the poster to fit the illustration. At a design meeting with the illustrator and the Manipulate team, I presented the rough poster layouts that I had designed and proposed a square format for the illustration. Below is one of Yifei’s rough black and white sketches of their proposed square illustration in place on the poster.

Yifei often uses gradients in their work so I thought it would be interesting to use a gradient as the background for the poster using colours taken from Yifei’s illustration. I generated a couple of rough designs that I showed to the team, showing how a gradient could be used to tie in the illustration with the layout and design of the poster.

As Yifei refined their illustration further, they sent me a palette of colours that I used to generate different colour variations of gradients. Below is a coloured rough of Yifei’s illustration with a gradient in the background of the poster using colours taken from the illustration palette.

The beautiful final illustration (below) includes much more detail and colour than the initial rough sketches and looks very striking on the poster layout. As I refined the poster with the final illustration in place, I made the Manipulate Festival logo and the other information a little smaller to give more emphasis to the image as well as refining the sizing of the various texts and logos in relation to each other. 

 

After experimenting with various colour combinations from Yifei’s palette for the gradient background and for the title, dates and other information, the Manipulate team and I agreed that the dark blue on the light green background was the strongest combination, creating a pleasing balance with the illustration and offering the most contrast for easy reading from a distance (one of the key functions of a poster).

The layout and design of the poster was then adapted for other marketing material that I designed, including: a printed programme guide; various press advertisements; posters of different sizes and shapes; and digital assets. I am pleased to say that this rational approach to designing the marketing material, working with the illustrator at the commissioning stage, and using the basic template from the previous year, meant that the design of the marketing material came within budget, yet still produced a distinct suite of materials to showcase the festival. 

www.manipulatearts.co.uk

Yifei’s Instagram: @yifeixiang99