poster Archives - The Work Of Neil Martin

New project: Chester Beer Festival 2010

Chester Charity Beer Festival is an annual three-day event that takes place in Chester. Run by Round Table, It raises money for good causes and charities through selling festival tickets and of course beer. You can see the project here.

I had already worked for the festival last year. In 2009, I developed the front cover of the programme, along with some A1 posters that were hung up at the festival. You can see that work here.

Before I began to work with the festival, they did not have any sort of true identity or promotional materials, with most of the posters and programme design being very sporadic each year. With no tight branding integration, the festival was lacking that spark that made it more appealing for people to attend. It was my job to design all of this year’s promotional materials.

The logo

Because 2009’s logo proved to be successful, I decided that instead of starting from scratch, I could use some of the equity of it and update rather than redesign it.

Last year's logo on the front of the programme.

One of the things that was added to the cover last time was Round Table’s own logo, seen above just below “2009”. Because the festival is run by Round Table, I thought it was important to keep this association as part of the new logo as Round Table do much more than host the festival. Eventually, this is what I came up with:

logo_minimal — The festival's new logo for 2010.

As you can see, it’s quite similar to 2009’s design, but with some improvements including the integration of Round Table’s logo directly into the festival’s logo. There’s also more refinement in the placement and sizing of all of the type. For those that are interested, the fonts being used are Cheboygan and Arno Pro.

The programme cover

With the logo complete, I moved straight onto the cover of the programme, which would be distributed to 2,000 people over the course of three days. Again, using a little equity from last year’s cover, I designed it in the style of a beer label.

The festival's programme cover for 2010.

I wanted this label to have much more detail than the 2009’s. Last year, I only had a few weeks to put the cover and poster designs together all whilst getting my coursework done as well. This year, as the project began in February for a May launch, I had more time to put something together. With the programme designed, I could then use design elements from it to influence everything else that needed to be designed.

The poster

The first thing that needed to be designed was the poster so the festival could begin its promotion. I started with something simple as the information that was going on the poster was a little scarce to begin with.

Once I had sent this over, it was clear that there was more information to go onto the poster and everything needed to be reworked for everything to fit on including ticket prices and of course where about the festival was being held. As I was struggling for information, I removed the frame altogether and went for something even simpler.

A much simpler version of the festival's poster.

It was pretty clear even as I was designing it that it didn’t feel right. It got across all of the information, but it wasn’t very attractive and it didn’t contain any of the design elements that were present on the programme’s cover. So, I redesigned again.

A reintroduction of the frame with a better layout.

After sending this over to the client, they were happy with it but I felt that there was still something not quite right about it. I felt that the logo was far too small and the dates were out of proportion and it still looked a little empty at the top. So, after another redesign, I ended up with this:

A bigger logo and better use of space.

Widening the top half of the frame meant that I could move the logo up and make it a touch bigger. By adding some feature circles, it reduced the amount of blank space that was causing a problem and I could also make the dates a touch bigger to go with the larger logo. After sending this over to the client, we were both happy with it. In total, there were 8 redesigns of the poster that got me to this version.

The t-shirt

Along with last year’s A1 posters, the client had asked if the design could also be used on t-shirts. Again, at the time, I didn’t have much time to come up with something but what I did come up with was a design that formed a pint glass out of beer-related words. With more time this year, I felt that I could improve on the design and make it look a bit more glass-like, as the previous version looked a little too blocky.

Left: 2009's t-shirt design. Right: 2010's t-shirt design.

The ticket

With three different nights for the festival, one ticket design wasn’t enough. Not only were there different prices for each ticket, but on the first day, there would be two events. The festival also offers all sponsors of the event free tickets and so a ticket design was needed for that too and so in total, there were 5 tickets designed.

Left: Saturday evening's ticket. Right: Sponsor ticket.

The sponsor ticket proved a bit of an issue to begin with. Sponsors are allowed to attend any of the events that are on over the three days. They’re also invited to the special sponsor’s bar and buffet. All of these days and times needed to be on the sponsor’s ticket which meant reorganising things on all of the tickets to allow for more space for all of the dates and times to be written on the sponsor’s ticket.

The back contained a map of where the Festival was, with directions from various parts of the surrounding areas.

The back of the ticket provides a simple map with directions.

The beer card

Having attended last year’s festival myself and actually gone through the process of going to the bar area to get a drink, I quickly discovered how annoying it was carrying around 3cm wide raffle tickets which were very likely to get ripped or simply lost. The client had asked me to come up with a better way of exchanging money for tokens for beer. Initially, I advised that it probably wasn’t worth redesigning the tokens because ultimately, they were going to get thrown away anyway a few minutes after being purchased. However, after a bit more thought, I realised that there was a good opportunity to come up with a better concept of mere tokens.

Since the price of the beer tokens had already been set at £5 for 4 beer tokens, there was no need to have any less than that. In other words, regardless of how many tokens you might want, you always bought in sets of four. With this in mind, I came up with the idea of having a beer card, containing four tokens. This way, the card itself could be designed at the same size as the ticket (A6) on card. This meant no more misplaced tokens or tokens torn because they had been covered in beer. Additionally, instead of giving in a raffle ticket, the customer would give in the card, have it marked by the bartender and then have it given back. The client really liked this idea and so I went ahead and designed it.

The beer card replaces small raffle tickets.

The programme

With everything else out of the way, the programme was the last thing to design. Although the festival began on May 13th, I had to wait until May 1st to design it because there were sponsor adverts and a full beer list to go in it, which weren’t finalised until late on. The design was influenced by the things I had already designed, using the thick yellow and red frame on each page.

Each page has its own frame similar to the poster, tickets and beer cards.

As a final touch, the client asked for a ranking system next to each of the beers as some of the die-hard festival-goers enjoy rating them. Scores were placed next to each of the 70+ beers.

The rating system was placed next to each beer listing.

The festival

With everything now designed, it was now time to look forward to 2,000 people descending into Chester to take part in the festival. I decided to take a trip to Chester myself and see my work in action.

Hundreds of glasses with the programme inside.

As a designer, it’s always fantastic to see my work ‘live’ and to know that so many people are not only looking at it, but using it, picking it up and reading it. It’s a fantastic feeling to see a room full of people all with the above programme in their hands.

Nearly everyone I met read the programme.

Throughout the evening, I took photos of people having a good time. Thankfully I got some shots of people with the guide in their hands.

The festival tshirts, modelled by staff.

It was also fantastic to see the t-shirts that I had designed on sale at the front of the marquee, as modelled by staff above.

It conclusion, working with the festival has been another fantastic experience. I enjoyed my minor role in working with them last year and I’ve enjoyed developing an entire campaign with them this year even more. In particular, I’m very happy with the beer card idea, which was very successful on the night, as I saw many people buying more than one card every time they bought some. It’s also quite an unusual experience for me as a designer seeing someone hand over money to buy a piece of card which is then valued at £5 each.

As mentioned at the start of this post, the festival’s profits all go to charity. This includes charities such as Claire House, who support families with sick children. Because these types of charities rely so heavily on donations, I decided that early on in the project, I would donate my whole fee to the festival’s fund. I am proud to support the festival for free because I believe that my fee will be put to good use by the charities that the festival supports. It’s also fantastic news that the festival this year raised over £10,000. A great festival and a great cause. I look forward to working with the festival in 2011, should they wish to work together again.

Your poster designed for £50

This is a short post, but one which I think is important and experimental.

Today, I’m starting a small advertising campaign using Facebook’s advertising system and if you’re here because you happened to click on my ad, then thank you for taking the time to have a look at the site.

As Facebook is constantly being used to promote parties, weddings and gigs, I thought it may be a good idea to focus the advert on designing specifically for these things. For the next few weeks, I’ll be offering A3 event posters designed to your specifications for a fixed rate of £50. Provided that you’re not looking to have something too complex, I will charge £50 for designing you an A3 poster for pretty much anything you’d like. This could be an upcoming gig for your band, someone’s birthday or maybe something a bit more refined such as a wedding. Whatever it is, I will keep my price at £50 for the next few weeks while my advertising campaign is running.

If you’d like to get in touch, please email me at neil AT the workof.co.uk.

New Project: One Design Show

As mentioned in one of my Tweets, me and my University of Chester graphic design class had an exhibition on June 18th to show off our finest work to design agencies and the public. As part of the promotion of the exhibition, I was tasked to produce it. This included invitations, posters and a website. You can view the work here.

Producing an entire exhibition is certainly a different experience than simply creating a one-off piece of design. Producing an exhibition means taking everything into account and being responsible for it all fitting together and I have to admit that there were times when it didn’t seem like it was going to be done on time.

It all started at the beginning of March, when the class were told about the exhibition and the need to form a design committee to help organise and produce the show. A group of seven students originally volunteered to help steer the production in the right direction. Over the course of the next few months, we’d slowly begin to develop the show. To help with this, I set up a Facebook group and liaised with the tutors to send out an email to everyone asking everyone to join it so I could keep the class up to date with developments.

We invited the whole class to begin coming up with themes for the show. Something that the design committee could work with to develop invitations, posters and anything else that was needed. We gave people two weeks to develop their ideas into A3 boards and then discuss them with the rest of the class. This proved to be incredibly successful and from this, the idea of using exaggerated facts and figures was chosen.

The committee begin coming up with a range of facts that could relate to design students and their three years at University. This included ideas, hangovers, swearing, paper pads and computer crashes. These facts were then given large figures, based on one person’s experiences, multiplied by 60 (the number of people on the course). So where the average person may have 20 coffees a week, 60 people will have nearly 200,000 over the course of three years. What was clear after coming up with these facts and figures was that there was one fact that would always remain at 1 – the design show itself. This realisation helped to steer the project into the interesting direction of thinking about the exhibition as a culmination of three years. A filtering of ideas, good times, bad times and arriving at one design show, hence why the show was given the name “One Design Show”.

The idea of the past three years being filtered into one show made me think of how it had been tapered to a point – the point being the show – and this gave me the idea of making the invitation a triangle. Something that had a (literal) point to it. Using a triangle for an invitation would give added impact when sending out to design agencies and colleges because how often does someone recieve a triangle-shaped piece of mail?

One of my tutors had mentioned in passing that the previous year’s students had managed to make the invitation its own envelope and this was something that I also wanted to do to so I began to experiment with triangles and how they could fold up into an envelope to keep it secure.

An initial idea for the invitation for One Design Show

The first idea consisted of a hexagon, with a cut from the centre to the edge. The invitation would then fold up into a concertina, leaving a triangle shape. The problem was that in order for this to work, there needed to be enough copy/image to fill 12 pages (six triangles on one side, six on the other) and this proved to be too much and not necessary. This design also meant that a separate envelope was needed. Additionally, because there was a lack of bleed area between the triangles, it meant that some of the artwork was bleeding into another triangle. In short, the idea failed, but the concept was there.

Sticking with the triangle idea but simplifying it, I decided to try it with three panels next to each other instead. This was much easier to handle and it meant that by adding a tab at the end of the triangles, I could fold the whole thing up and the tab would secure it in place, thereby forming its own envelope. I went with this shape and started on the design work.

The numbers for each of the facts were quite big. I wanted some way of trying to relate these big numbers back to a digital medium and the obvious choice was pixels because that’s what any piece of artwork is made up from at some point or another before being printed. I have always enjoyed the work of people like eBoy and their method of using pixelation as an art form. I wanted to take this and try and make it work on a larger, invitation and poster-sized scale. For this reason, I decided that iconography would be great to use.

The original set of icons and one blown up.

I love working with iconography. It forces you to be economical with your design because you only have a 16x16px area to work with. Communicating a computer crash or a hangover in such a small space is quite an interesting project on its own but I had to make the icons work at print resolution. When a 16x16px image is printed at 300dpi, it is less than 3mm in width. This meant that the icon would need to be blown up if it was to be seen. However, by blowing something up so small to such big sizes, it was inevitable that they would look blurry and messy. Photoshop’s default method of resizing images is “Bicubic”, which is useful for things like photos. However, Photoshop also has another resize method called “Nearest Neighbour”, which allows pixels to stay sharp at larger sizes even when resized to ten times its original size.

The icons that I designed, although nice lacked colour and so a few of them were eventually redesigned including a red coffee mug instead of a white coffee cup and a few of these icons were using on the invitation that can you see on the project page.

Once the invitations were designed, it was then a case of finding a quote from the printers. The design department didn’t have a large budget to spend on promoting the show and tasked me with finding a suitable printers to print 400 copies of the invitation. Luckily, the invitation was small enough that two would fit on one A3 page, which meant that it immediately cut the costs in half. Unfortunately, due to the unusual shape of the invitation, they could not offer diecutting for price inside the department’s budget and this meant that I, along with a few other people were tasked with cutting them manually.

400 invitiations manually cut and ready to be sent.

After the invitations were taken care of, the next thing was Moo Minicards. At an early stage of producing the show, I had remembered a great website called Moo. They offer business card-like cards, slightly smaller called Moo MiniCards. I thought these would be a great addition to the show, allowing someone to take something away from it and keep a piece of student’s work with them. My idea was to put a piece of student’s artwork on a total of 100 cards and order 5 packs of them. Each pack costs just £10 so it was well worth it. I requested that all students send me three pieces of their work with their full name and website address. These cards were then scattered all over the tables between each student’s portfolio, making the tables come alive with colour and inviting people to pick them up and look more closely at the work.

Moo MiniCards scattered all over the tables.

The next thing to design were the posters which would help direct people to place in which the exhibition was being held. Originally, the idea was to produce 5 x A1 posters that would be easily visible around the campus. However, after walking around the campus and figuring out where the posters would go, it was clear that more than 5 would be needed. The budget didn’t allow for this. Instead, the posters were designed at A3, which meant that more could be produced and a fraction of the cost of 5 x A1 poster. A series of 8 posters were designed and printed twice, giving me 16 posters to place around the campus in preparation for the opening night.

So as to identify each piece of work on display, nametags for each exhibition stand were designed in the same style as the invitation and placed above each stand. Although a very simple part of the whole production process, these triangles, like the invitations had to be manually cut out of card.

The exhibition, ready for opening night.

Finally, a simple website was designed by myself and built by Liam Gallagher, another student on the course, that housed a few student’s work, descriptions of it and information on the show itself including when it was open and how to get there.

A few of the students who exhibited and/or helped with the show.

Overall, producing the University of Chester’s graphic design show was a really good experience. Liaising with so many people about so many different aspects of the show proved to be very difficult at times due to other coursework-related committments, but I believe that the end result was executed well. In particular, I was really happy with the quality and popularity of the Moo MiniCards that I had designed. As mentioned, I had a total of 500 cards printed and by the end of the seven day opening period of the exhibition, there were less than 100 left. Also, I was pleased to overhear some of the public who attended the opening night of the exhibition express their approval of the posters I had designed. It’s always nice to hear that something you’ve designed has been met with praise.

I’ve really enjoyed working on such a large scale project and I hope that I can do so again in the future.

New project: Chester Beer Festival

cover

The Chester Charity Beer Festival aims to provide the public with a great 3-day event of music, food, and of course beer. With over 70 beers to choose from, the beer festival is something any beer connoisseur should try. To help make the festival even more enjoyable, I offered to design the front cover of their programme guide, along with some A1 posters that would be displayed around the large marquee tent where the event was hosted. You can see the full project here.

Originally, I had simply wanted to place an advert for myself in the programme guide, as the festival relies on local businesses and donators to fund a lot of the costs that naturally accumulate when hosting such a big event. After getting in touch with one of the organisers of the event, they told me that they were unsure of how much exposure I would get. However, they offered me the opportunity to develop something larger than just an advert in the programme guide, suggesting a piece of artwork similar to my 10×10 project. Something large that could be hung inside the marquee tent. I was more than happy to do this because not only did I want to advertise myself, but also the festival itself.

I already had an idea of what I wanted to do for a piece of artwork and began asking people for as many words as they could think of for drinking a beer. It was really interesting finding out just how many words and phrases there are! I tried to stay away from words and phrases for getting drunk, because that’s not what the festival was about and besides, pretty much any word can be used to describe getting drunk! (Curtained, trollied, windowed, etc.)

While people were replying to my request for words, I began work on the front cover of the programme guide. I had managed to find a copy of 2006’s guide and it looked very bland and unappealing. The beer festival is about having fun and I wanted to communicate this with some tighter branding. I began research into beer logos, beer labels and beer mats.

By this time, I had received enough replies to my request for beer words and I started working on the poster. I had a clear idea of what I wanted to do with it, transforming the words into a giant pint glass. I was really happy with how it looked. I love how flexible typography can be with things like the mesh tool in Illustrator. It’s amazing how typography can form into image. Once the cover was complete, I sent it to the organisers for inspection and they came back to me with the request to add their logo into the design. I then used it as a template to then design my own advert that was to be in the programme guide. I wanted it to relate back to the front cover so that when people came across it, they’d know immediately that it was connected to the event and that I was responsible for designing it.

My advert, which was used inside the programme guide.

The programme guide didn’t look right with just a plain colour as the background and so I decided to use the poster design instead. I believe it adds something really nice to the overall design of it.

The morning of the first night of the festival, I headed down to the marquee for the first time to personally put up five A1 posters. I had the opportunity to see the programme guides all printed out, ready for the night ahead. It was really nice seeing so many of them. So nice seeing my artwork mass produced.

Poster for the Chester Charity Beer Festival

I returned the night after to attend the festival itself. It was a fun night and an incredible amount of people attended. As I walked into the festival, I saw lots of people holding the programme guide, reading through it and stuck in their back pockets as they sampled the range of beers on offer. It was fantastic seeing so many people with my artwork in their hands. A total of about 700 people attended the event.

A day or two later, I received an email from the organiser, saying that I had had some interest in the A1 posters and they wanted to take one. I was happy that they’d generated interest.

I really enjoyed working with the festival to make it visually appealing and would happily work with them again to produce next year’s festival, with an even bigger opportunity to produce tighter branding. I look forward to 2010’s festival.