Progress on the poster!

After a gentle exchange of emails and consensus, a finalised design for the poster has been decided, hooray!
after my last post we were left with this:


That design was emailed around the production company and garnered the following response:
>>logos - St
John's Mummers I'm sure will want one and Balliol deserves one as I think
(hope!) we're going to get a hefty chunk from them. Does the writing have to
be quite so pink? I was wondering if we could have a look at a kind of reddyer
pink like the one liz used when she was messing about. Also, font? Did you not
want to use soemthing more scripty? Lastly, and this is probably harder to do
and me just being fussy... maybe have something on the horizontal, either
picture or writing, so it's not all on the diagonal. What do you think? It
might create more space for the logos.

and a bunch of requests to add logos for various funding bodies, including AKM, which probably explains why we were sent to O'reilly logo(as a mistake, the file was ambiguously labeled something like 'newlogo.jpg').

As I don't want to reveal the finished design just yet I shall give you good peoples of the interweb some tantalising sneaky peaks:





The many colours of the different logos, especially white, was drawing too much attention away from the text and confusing the lower half of the image. Too resolve this issue I decided to make the logos the same colour as the lightest parts of the green velvet. The logos still stand out but they don't distract from the important selling points of the show. To keep the OFS sweet and to highlight ticketmaster as a means of getting tickets they venue logos remained in full colours.

It's not actually a completely finished design, though. Presently we are waiting on the publicity guy at the New Theatre (which owns the OFS) to approve the poster design. Once the poster has been approved we'll develop the imagery and concept a bit for the flyers. I hope Kerry at the New isn't waiting for flyer designs before he approves anything. Sarah will prolly have checked anyway.

I have a couple of ideas for the flyers already. Sarah has suggested that we try to get flyers that look like burnt photos. This is easy enough to achieve by having the flyers custom die-cut, but that costs money we don't have. As things stand the posters are likely to be printed in (inferior) digital printers to economise. The worst thing about digital printers is that they leave stupidly un professional white edges on their print outs and never offer to trim them off (which they only charge about £15 extra for) as a result the posters look like you've run up to OUCS and had them printed off for you. Which you might as well do, as they do it at cost and no VAT.

GRR unprofessional printers. I GRR at them.

So flyers. I was thinking maybe some kooky A7 minimalist stuff, which can save money on the same number of flyers by being smaller. They would be credit card sized and look a little something like this:



Short, snappy and pushing the blog.

Alternatively we might do the standard thing of reproducing the poster in flyer form. There's nothing wrong with this, but it can produce boring flyers. eg




Ideas need to be workshop a bit before coming up with anything. Hmm. Let's do that online. The first problem I highlighted that just reproducing the poster produced a boring layout. Easy solution: mix the layout up a bit.




The trick is to keep things separated and clear enough to read without your eye having to search things out. One way to do this is have your elements all fit in to a basic shape or line. On the second design this shape is provided by the photo, which is placed to emphasise it being a discarded object.




Almost all flyers need to be flipped over to get all the relevant information. With an image of two halves like the photo we might have a little fun mixing that up a bit. The flyer is now a little more interactive and plays with ideas of asymmetry and things being revealed.




The Photo is a wide rather than tall image so things might be simpler if we stick to a landscape aspect.




Hmm hopefully the crew will have some thoughts on these and express a preference!

takecare, y'alls

Leigh