Manchester Book Fair Boards

BRIEF & CONCEPT This brief was to create something that would sell at the Manchester Book Fair. I wanted to design something that anyone could enjoy and not have a specific target audience in mind. The imagery I came up with was a set of 12 monsters. I built up a back story to give them more of a purpose and called it ‘The Monster Club’.

The concept was to make a set of postcards but it soon developed into having more deliverables and content. It eventually turned into a pack which included the original A6 postcard, bookmark and A3 poster. Having designed an original typeface I then included a type specimen to showcase the typeface with the supporting imagery into my final deliverables.

TYPEFACE I wanted everything to be of my own work including the typeface so I designed my own. The concept and style of the typeface was to have a playful and loose approach to it so it doesn’t follow a strict grid system or stick to the rules of traditional ways of typeface design.

It includes all the uppercase, lowercase, numbers and glyths characters so there is an opportunity for it to be used on other products or designs. The name of the typeface is simply taken from a typical characteristic of a ‘scary’ monster so using the rawr seems right.

I wanted to stick to a minimal colour palette so I decided to only have three colours. This would allow me to apply the colours in a way where all the characters have them and they all work together as a set.

TYPE SPECIMEN This type specimen was to show off the typeface and show how well it works together with the images used for the products. The idea of the front cover was the childrens belief of monsters hiding under the bed or in the closet where you could only see their eyes. The book uses that concept and plays with it by only showing the eyes of the monsters and once the front cover is turned, you reveal all the monsters hiding behind the page.

The content shows off the typeface with the full alphabet and also words and phrases related to monsters to see how the typeface can work in context. The images of the monsters are used to break up the pages of words to add more visual interest.

ADDITIONAL CONTENT The imagery created for the brief had the potential to be applied to a wider range of products. Each illustration is strong enough to appear on its own. This opens up new opportunities as to where these illustrations could be seen, whether that be through the means of print or on screen.

FINAL PRODUCTS The initial pack was produced as an edition of 10. These where sold at the Manchester Book Fair. The additional material was produced to exploit the brief further as the imagery opened up a lot of potential.