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.
