Engage
Create a vibrant set of A5 playing cards to be conversation prompts on a leadership programme run by Engage (previously the National Association for Gallery Education) on the theme of ‘Cultural Democracy’. A snappy two-week turnaround print job.
To come up with a visual approach that would work in our limited timeframe, I looked at old textbook covers from the 1960’s for inspiration – and thanks to my dad for studying computer engineering there are some corkers on my shelves!
Their abstract graphics and bright colours got me straight into working with as little as possible, and into making circles, lines and squares work hard to tell some pretty specific stories. With card titles as diverse as ‘The organic intellectual’ and ‘Less about the figureheads’, I did a lot of sketching and a bit of head-scratching…
A really nice conceptual job that took me straight back to art school thinking. We’d often do projects where you had to use a limited visual vocabulary (simple shapes) to produce something that communicated a complex idea. This job had the extra layer of needing the set of twenty cards to work together, despite the ideas coming from a broad group of individuals and their experiences.
I think we did a bang up job! The cards were bound using a nice 4-way rubber band and the corners were rounded using a special cutter I had. They’re really tactile, the colour scheme I chose gave them a visual approachability and the graphics were a hit on the day. The client said they far exceeded expectations, so I was happy.