Whilst I’m obviously all for boosting our country’s economy, I can’t help but feel the poster designs are a little under-developed.

The ‘entrepreneurs’ poster featured Richard Branson is arguably the strongest of the bunch, with it’s strong black and white imagery highlighting the British colours, but even that’s not great (no pun intended).

Some of the of the layouts feel cramped and crowded, with the union jack at the foot of the posters forcing it’s way into the compositions, and the typography isn’t anything to shout about, with it’s mixed type sizes and awkward placement of ‘Britain’.

For a campaign that’s designed to show that “Britain today is simply a great place to visit, study and work” (if you can find work or afford the university education fees) and help repair our economy, it feels rushed.

Oh well, at least it only cost £500,000.

GREAT campaign posters

After 2 days of stress, caffeine, hard work and a very late night, I finally submitted my entry for a D&AD competition to design a poster to advertise their upcoming second lecture form their ‘North’ series.

The first D&AD North lecture was given by Greg Quinton, creative director of The Partners. This time it’s a joint lecture by Flo Heiss and Danny Brooke-Taylor, entitled ‘Two Worlds Collide‘, and centres on the merger of their two companies Dare and Miles, Calcraft, Briginshaw, Duffy, different companies, from different creative fields, with different backgrounds, coming together.

Image courtesy of D&AD 2011

The competition was exclusively for degree students from universities in and around Manchester and the North West, including Stockport College (where I’m studying), Manchester Metropolitan, University of Salford, University of Leeds and Shillington College.

One winner will be picked from each university who will each be given free entry to the lecture, whilst one overall winner will be picked by Flo and Danny who will win a years D&AD membership and a D&AD annual.

The pressure was really on in when it came to getting the idea formed and executed. Thankfully fellow entrant Tomm Warham was on hand to help keep us focused…

Thanks Tomm for the image

My entry centres on the Dare concept that the different backgrounds of the creatives working there lead to ‘free-range creativity’.

From their ‘about’ page;

This is a truly creative marriage. Designers, creative teams, copywriters and technologists are fully integrated, sitting amongst each other. And they’re supported by a range of other disciplines in a flexible creative development process. So ideas flow naturally throughout Dare.
It’s what we call ‘free-range creativity’.

Flo and Danny are represented as two eggs which I intended to be humorous, as opposed to serious. Anybody who’s taken a look at their twitter feeds @Floheiss and @deeebeeeteee for example will see they’re full of humorous thoughts and musings.

I just hope they’re not offended by my interpretations of them!

A poster to advertise the fictional experimental sound and image festival ‘Sonus’ created for a brief at university.

At the start of the brief we were each given one typeface from a possible three, which we would be working with exclusively throughout. From a random choice of Akidenz Grotesk, Baskerville or Zurich, as well as an accompanying colour palette of three hues (purposefully picked to be awkward to use together I suspect).

My typeface was Zurich and my palette consisted of the following colours;

Prior to designing the posters we were tasked with ‘exploring the nuances of our font’ through the creation of experimental and abstract thumbnail compostions, which lead to us sketching wireframes or rough drafts of designs on layout paper at A4 size, which we then worked up into more refined designs at A3 size, which finally formed the basis of our A1 designs.

Ironically my initial paper designs look nothing like the final piece. Looking back at my initial thumbnails, it would appear as though I haven’t actually used them as the basis for my design!

Papyrus is one of the worst fonts to use for anything. It’s on par with Comic Sans and Jokerman and it’s use generally gives an amateur finish to work.

And as for the heavy use of the outer glow layer setting… eurgh.

Hire a designer!