Mid-Century Modern Posters

This is a poster that I designed as part of an identity for Dovecot’s Mid-Century Modern: Art & Design from Conran to Quant, an exhibition which ‘presents the design, fashion, and art of a group of radical young architects, designers, photographers, and artists who redefined the concept of youth and the established order of post-war Britain’. The poster is printed in various sizes from A4 to A1, and the identity also appears on other marketing material including banners, invitations, and flyers, and also in online iterations. Below is the alternative poster design.




Mid-Century Modern: Art & Design from Conran to Quant is at Dovecot, 10 Infirmary Street, Edinburgh EH1 1LT from 15 July 2020. www.dovecotstudios.com

Edinburgh Art Festival Posters 4

Because of the Covid-19 pandemic, this year’s Edinburgh Art Festival has been cancelled. To mark the dates of what would have been the 2020 festival (30 July – 30 August) 10 artists from previous festival editions have been invited to make responses. Amongst other projects, I have been working with the festival on a series of posters that will appear in locations throughout Edinburgh, making the artists’ original artwork shipshape and ready for printing by the arts agency, Jack Arts. This one is a set of four posters by the artist and activist Ellie Harrison that reveals details of the artist’s carbon footprint for transport. For this project, I have designed two contextual posters that bookend the artist’s work. Ellie's posters can be found at sites at Meadowbank and Calton Road, until 30 August.

www.edinburghartfestival.com

www.ellieharrison.com

Edinburgh Art Festival Posters 3

This year’s Edinburgh Art Festival has been cancelled because of the Covid-19 pandemic. To mark the dates of what would have been the 2020 festival (30 July – 30 August) 10 artists from previous festival editions have been invited to make responses. Amongst other projects, I have been working with the festival on a series of posters that will appear in locations throughout Edinburgh, making the artists’ original artwork shipshape and ready for printing by the arts agency, Jack Arts. This one is a set of three posters by the artist Ruth Ewan and revisits Sympathetic Magick, a project originally created by Ruth for the 2018 festival (you can see the booklet I designed for Sympathetic Magick here). Ruth’s posters can be found at poster sites across the city, including: Meadowbank; Royal Mile; Murrayfield Stadium; Potterow and Easter Road, until 30 August.

www.edinburghartfestival.com












Ruth Ewan, Magic Words (Ian, Margaret, Peggy), 2020, posters for Edinburgh Art Festival, 1524mm x 1016mm

www.ruthewan.com

Edinburgh Art Festival Posters 2

Sadly, this year’s Edinburgh Art Festival will not take place because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Instead, as Edinburgh begins to emerge from lockdown, the Art Festival has invited 10 artists from previous festival editions, to work with them to mark the dates of what would have been the 2020 festival (30 July – 30 August). Amongst other projects, I have been working with the festival on a series of posters that will appear in locations throughout Edinburgh, making the artists’ original artwork shipshape and ready for printing by the arts agency, Jack Arts. This one is a set of two posters by the artist Rae-Yen Song and expands on a project originally created for the 2018 festival. Rae-Yen’s posters can be viewed outside the Clerk Street Cinema, 1/3 Clerk Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9JH, until 30 August.

www.edinburghartfestival.com










Rae-Yen Song, Song Dynasty, 2018, posters for Edinburgh Art Festival, 1524mm x 1016mm and 1524mm x 2032mm

www.songdynasty.life

Edinburgh Art Festival Posters 1

Because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the 2020 edition of the Edinburgh Art Festival will not take place. Instead, as Edinburgh begins to emerge from lockdown, the Art Festival has invited 10 artists from previous festival editions, to work with them to mark the dates of what would have been the 2020 festival (30 July – 30 August). Amongst other projects, I have been working with the festival on a series of posters that will appear in locations throughout Edinburgh, making the artists’ original artwork ready for printing by the arts agency, Jack Arts. This one is a billboard by the artist Tam Joseph and is based on a painting originally made in 2012 that was first presented as a billboard in the 2014 festival. As well as making the image ready for print (which, because of it’s huge size, sent my computer into meltdown as well as the machines of the printers!), I also designed the contextual panels that appear on either side of the structure. Tam’s billboard can be viewed on Middle Meadow Walk, EH8, until 30 August.

www.edinburghartfestival.com










Tam Joseph The Hand Made Map of the World, 2020, poster for Edinburgh Art Festival, 4000mm x 2440mm

www.tamjosephartlive.com

More DIY Art

Here is the latest activity pack that I have designed for the Community Engagement team at Edinburgh Art Festival, this time with Naomi Garriock, an artist and educator who runs the independent art space Basic Mountain, supporting the Edinburgh art community with exhibitions and residencies. DIY Art is a series of activity packs from EAF and selected artists, inviting people to get creative at home. The instructional creativity kits give insights into an artist’s practice, showing how to use their processes and techniques to create unique artworks. The other packs that I have designed were created by artist Alexa Hare and artist and illustrator Sofia Niazi and all can be downloaded here.

Signs for a Pandemic

Dovecot Studios asked me to design a series of signs to remind visitors to socially distance and to help them safely navigate the building as Dovecot re-opens now that lockdown restrictions are easing. The brief included posters, wall texts in vinyl, and circular floor stickers in a mixture of designs: one set following the Dovecot brand guidelines for the public spaces of the building, and one set in designed in the branding that I had previously developed for the Mid-Century Modern exhibition. As well as fitting in with the branding of each space, it was important that the designs clearly communicated their message, as their purpose is to safely direct the public around the space.








Above are some of the vinyl texts, floor stickers and posters that I designed for the public spaces of the building using elements of the Dovecot identity of Dovecot pink, the typeface Whitney and the two contrasting weights of underline. Below are the floor stickers that I designed in the identity that I developed for the marketing material of the exhibition, Mid-Century Modern: Art & Design from Conran to Quant, which is the exhibition that Dovecot will re-open to the public with.









You can see the identity that I created for Mid-Century Modern: Art & Design from Conran to Quant in this post.

Mid-Century Modern: Art & Design from Conran to Quant is at Dovecot, 10 Infirmary Street, Edinburgh EH1 1LT from 15 July 2020. www.dovecotstudios.com

Mid-Century Modern Marketing Material

I was asked to design an identity for the marketing material to promote Dovecot’s Mid-Century Modern: Art & Design from Conran to Quant, an exhibition which ‘presents the design, fashion, and art of a group of radical young architects, designers, photographers, and artists who redefined the concept of youth and the established order of post-war Britain’. An aspect of the brief was to create an identity that would make links with the cover of Swinging London: A Lifestyle Revolution, an already-published book that acts as a catalogue to the exhibition, and which is on sale at Dovecot during the show.

The book cover informed the choice of typefaces used on the marketing material as well as the colour palette of red, white and black. For my designs, the exhibition title is typeset in Bureau Grot Condensed with a customised, shortened hyphen and the remaining copy set in Neue Haas Unica: both typefaces were designed later than the focus of the exhibition, but their roots are much earlier, so are fitting for an exhibition of swinging sixties modernism (Unica was originally released in 1980 but was based on two earlier typefaces: Univers, which was originally released in 1957; and Helvetica, a typeface that is one of the hallmarks of the International Typographic Style that emerged from the work of Swiss designers in the 1950s and 60s. The sans-serif Bureau Grot was developed in 1989 and is based on grotesque typefaces from the nineteenth-century that I believe were often used by designers in the sixties as a substitute for Helvetica, which was less widely available at that time).

Dovecot supplied a set of images of objects from the exhibition which I converted to grayscale, then placed behind a transparent red, creating a striking contrast with the predominantly white type. I presented versions with different images, but the image favoured by the team at Dovecot was of this shelving unit designed by Terence Conran. I designed two alternative treatments for the type: one with the text arranged vertically, much like the type on the cover of the book, and one with a horizontal arrangement. The team liked both versions and each treatment was eventually used, with the version above being the lead poster and the one below as an alternative version. In some iterations of the design, the type is used without the image.




The identity was designed to be adaptable and once the identity for the posters was established, it was then developed to appear on designs for banners, which are displayed both in and outside of the Dovecot building, and in various forms on the Dovecot website. Below are two versions of the identity in use on the website and at the bottom is an email footer used by Dovecot staff.








Below is the poster and banner in Dovecot:




In addition, I also designed an invitation to the private view (below) and a printed flyer to promote events around the exhibition – the front of the flyer is the same design as the poster, the image at the bottom is the reverse of the flyer.






Below is an advert for Mid-Century Modern: Art & Design from Conran to Quant in the March/April 2020 issue of Homes and Interiors Scotland:




Below is one of the banners outside Dovecot Studio in Infirmary Street:




UPDATE: Mid-Century Modern: Art & Design from Conran to Quant was due to open on 3 April 2020 but because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the opening was delayed until July when some lockdown restrictions were eased. As the posters had already been printed with the start date of 3 April, Dovecot asked me to design a sticker that could be placed over the redundant date. You can see my mock-up of the stickered poster below. I also designed some social distancing signage for Dovecot which you can see in this post.




Mid-Century Modern: Art & Design from Conran to Quant is at Dovecot, 10 Infirmary Street, Edinburgh EH1 1LT from 15 July 2020. www.dovecotstudios.com

Yale Representation Flyers

I was asked to design an A5 flyer for Yale Representation, specialists in selling books across the UK, to be inserted in the Yale Books Autumn Winter catalogue 2020, that would promote Yale Representation's services to bookshops and publishers. The flyer is double-sided with a photograph – taken by me – of a selection of books from publishers that Yale represent alongside text that I copy-edited from the Yale Representation website. I also came up with the straplines ‘Fantastic books from leading publishers’ and ‘Supporting Bookshops Promoting Publishers’. The flyer is set in the Yale typeface, an old style serif designed by Matthew Carter that was first released in 2004. The blue is adapted from the dark azure used in association with Yale University. The flyer was printed by 4-Print, a lithographic commercial printer in Surrey, on 100gsm uncoated paper – a nice contrast to the silk paper of the catalogue itself.

DIY Art

I have been collaborating with the Community Engagement team at Edinburgh Art Festival on DIY Art, a series of activity packs from EAF and selected artists, inviting people to get creative at home. The instructional creativity kits give insights into an artist’s practice, showing how to use their processes and techniques to create unique artworks. The packs were created by artist Alexa Hare and artist and illustrator Sofia Niazi and can be downloaded here.






For the series, I generated an identity that has a DIY/homemade aesthetic but is underpinned by a cool, pared-back rationality that reflects the previous work I have done with the Festival. The brief was to create a simple contemporary design that was flexible and could accommodate different types of information but that would still present a cohesive series appealing to children, teenagers and adults alike. A major consideration was that, although a number of packs were being printed and distributed by the Festival, most would be downloaded and printed at home so I took care to keep the artwork within standard  print margins and not to use areas of unnecessary flat colour that would drink up lots of ink!

The Festival gave me some examples of activity packs from other arts organisations to look at, which gave me some clues for the initial direction of the design, particularly the choice of typeface: a common feature of the packs was the use of simple, geometric sans serif typefaces. Having assembled a list of appropriate typefaces I then started to think about the DIY element and how this could be expressed in the design. I was thinking about rubber stamps, potato prints and other DIY printing techniques so I started to investigate display typefaces that carried this aesthetic. With an initial selection of typefaces I developed a series of logos, eventually settling on a circular motif, hopefully reminiscent of a potato print.  I presented a shortlist of iterations to the team at EAF and we finally settled on the typeface, Metallophile Sp8, designed by Mark Simonson, not only for the logo but also for the typesetting of the text inside, something that I had not initially considered, having selected other typefaces for this purpose.



I really like the feel of Metallophile Sp8, it is well-balanced and  carries some of the coolness of Futura but has lots of subtle quirks that are amplified when the type is scaled up – despite this, it remains very readable when set as text, particularly in the light version. In addition, Metallophile includes ligatures and a set of alternative glyphs for some letters, including a double-storey ‘a’ and a single-storey ‘a’ – as the activity packs are aimed primarily at children I think the single-storey ‘a’ , with its connotations of schoolbooks, is more fitting in this context. Mark Simonson’s website describes Metallophile Sp8 as a ‘facsimile of 8-point sans serif type as set on a hot metal typesetting machine. The effect is very different from modern digital renditions of its cousin, Futura, which are coldly precise in and look quite different at text sizes. Hot metal faces were designed for specific point sizes, while modern digital faces take a one-font-for-all-sizes approach. Metallophile Sp8 captures much of the characteristic warmth of hot metal, which is particularly refreshing in such a geometric design.’



In collaboration with the team at EAF, the design was refined to fit with the content from the two artists. The text and images for the activity instruction pages from each artists are quite different, requiring a slightly different approach for each but both packs have elements that are consistent, and are underpinned by the same grid, making a cohesive, connected series. Initially, for the cover, I had considered enclosing the artists’ work within circular boxes that echo the circular logo, and as a way of unifying the two packs but, as the design progressed, it became clear that this would not work as the final images selected by the artists for the cover didn’t work within a circle. I think that, in the end, the two different solutions for the artists’ work on the cover highlights the artists’ different practices while maintaining a sense of a series.





It’s been great fun working on this project and I hope that we have created a pack that will inspire children – and maybe some adults – to get creative during lockdown.

www.edinburghartfestival.com
www.marksimonson.com