Inspiration:

This project was brought to me by Pot Of Sauce, a marketing agency for events. They were working with a small festival that was celebrating their 10 year anniversary and didn't have any kind of merchandise to sell on site. They needed a quick turn around as the event was to happen the following weekend, and the design would go to print. They opted for a retro feel through Risoprinting. Risopritning is a cost effective and interesting way of printing with a set number of inks, that are not mixed to produce a variety of colours but instead are printed directly on top of each other, with semi-transparency to get the effect as such in the inspiration posters below.

The brainstorming:

I started by utlising the design I had illustrated for their map. The illustration had been used across flyers, social media and ads and had performed really well. However, not that far into the design process, I felt that the illustration wasn't working as I had intended in the riso style. I swithced tack and found a doodle in my notebook that I utilised as the basis for the poster going forward. This relied heavily on the overlapping colours to create a more interesting look.

The colours:

Then I had a play around with the colours nd typography. We opted to splt the text up with a blue ink being used to highlight the name of the festival. This made it easier to read and felt far more striking.

To get a better feel for how the print would look, and to guage interest in the posters, I created a digitally textured version of the poster. This helped me see how I would like the poster to feel rather than the blocky, vibrant colours on the screen. The tricky part with riso is that the inks just do not translate tot he screen because they can be fluorescent. Then I had to format the file to work with the risoprinter.

Mockups:

Mockups are important with print because I think they give you a feel for how the poster/print material will scale.

Submission:

Finally I was ready to submit my file to the printer. The digital file looked like this:

Using just 3 colours, Fluroescent pink, Yellow and Aqua blue. I was super impressed with how they came out. You can see a photo below, but I have been told that the colours are far brighter in real life!