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.
