Pick Me Up Graphic Arts Festival 2015 part 2

Welcome to the second part of my favourite things from Pick Me Up festival 2015.

I watched a lecture by Robert Sollis, co- fonder of Europa on how they developed this year's identity for the festival. The studio developed several different variations of their typeface to create a dynamic visual identity which I think looks appropriate to the event, which is about innovation, the handmade and unique.

Examples of the typefaces

The promotional posters for the event were hand screen-printed in three colours, and those that were too big were painstakingly hand painted (such as the large sign right outside the venue). I love the overprinting on the spotty words.

 

Screen printed poster

The wall inside the Pick Me Up platform room was covered in these posters, with keywords about the event.

Screen-printed keywords (borrowed from PMU Facebook page)

One of the most interesting things to me about the identity was the way that they used the colour separations from the screen-printed posters to inspire some cut out large installations for inside of the festival. I always think it's really cool how you can sometimes still make sense of an image/ text even when not all of the colour separations are present (when screen-printing). You can see on the image below what I'm on about (sorry it is a bit dark!)

Installation with parts of the typeface visible

Back to some of my favourite works.
I had a go at using a printing machine with Sope Studio. They had prepared a series of background patterns, which you could choose from and then choose a second tile to be printed on the top, creating some really cool bits of art (they're all featured on a special Instagram page). Here's mine:

Sope Studio tiles

The guys also had some great work for sale, some was again based on geology and rocks (a bit of a theme going on!) such as this one by Lydia Shirreff, and some more of their lino printed tile designs.

 

Finally I bought a print by LaTigre, a graphic design studio based in Milan, directed by the designers Luisa Milani and Walter Molteni. I really liked the geometry and simplicity of this screen print, but it also has texture when you look closely.

There were lots of other amazing artists but I can't write about them all, so I advise that you visit immediately! The exhibition is on until 4th May at Somerset House. 

I realised that I had totally forgotten to mention the marvellous stand that was Ohh Deer! They were extremely nice and let me make a lovely Deer themed greetings card by sticking lots of stuff and scribbles together and then they had a postbox to post it to a friend.

I bought some coasters from them to brighten up my desk.

Glam rock coaster Gemma Correll

Elephant by Sophie Corrigan