THE BRIEF Ben Waddington, founder of Still Walking Festival approached Birmingham City University with a design brief. Still Walking were looking for a new brand identity, the design work involving a flyer, website design & build and anything else that would help promote Still Walking and make them a successful brand, the brief was given to myself and Theodora Pangou who I collaborated with through this project. Still Walking is a walking festival based in Birmingham City, in the past he has ran such tours as mosaic explorations and discussions, Black Sabbath home and gig tours and tours on the mysterious boulders around the city. Still Walking festival is a great opportunity to discover the city of Birmingham and a great opportunity for some intellectual discussion. Ben asked us to merge both mine and Theo’s designs together with some more pointers from himself, I had my first go at a live client website, designing and building it from scratch.
STILL WALKING FESTIVAL BIRMINGHAM 13 - 22 March www.stillwalking.org @stillwalkers
Seven walks over seven days exploring Birmingham's overlooked landscapes, features, routes and zones. ÂŁ5 per walk, advance
THE POSTER
“I really like the squares used in the poster, I can see a brand forming from this, lets work with this idea.� - Ben Waddington Ben really liked the poster, he decided he wanted us to work with this theme, he wanted us to get a feel for the brand before design it, so we could incorporate the mystery and adventure of the festival into the brand. The green colour scheme was chosen throughout discussion and a font, Signika was chosen.
THE FLYER
The flyer was worked on in collaboration with Theodora Pangou, the initial designs were designed by myself, using map scans, dots and green coloured squares. After my initial designs I passed the files over to Theodora and she worked on this with her knowledge and skills of editorial design.
RESEARCH
For the flyer I visited IKON gallery and picked up some flyers and brochures for some inspiration, these flyers gave me a few ideas. Ben wanted continuity within the brand so the website needed to resemble the flyer and poster designs, the squares were the main aspect we wanted to incorporate into the web design. After some talk with Ben I agreed to attempt the website myself rather than contacting a web designer for the job, this was a big challenge for me and I was proud that Ben trusted me to take on the task.
WEBSITE I decided to use a web builder called www.moonfruit.com, Moonfruit gave me the opportunity to freely design the site and build links to achieve a minimal but effective outcome. The blog needed to be incorporated into the website which was previously on Wordpress, at first this seemed quite simple – a HTML box that would bring up the blog page from Wordpress. After I changed the domain url over to the new site, the Wordpress blog and site was not accessible, this was a shock and I had to fix it! I began contacting web friendly professionals that assisted me with locating these blogs, we located an XML file and managed to retrieve this information and added it to a newly set up Wordpress account which would be the new home of the Still Walking blog. www.stillwalking.org
SCREEN PRINTING BAGS Whilst I had been working on the web build my collaborator was working on icons to symbolize the different walks that Still Walking festival hosted. The icons were firstly designed to be placed on the website but we felt they had too much potential to just have on a digital screen, and really felt they could become more of a part of the festival and give it a bigger identity. We decided that Still Walking could give out tote bags, this idea would help promote the festival as they would be used by customers beyond the festival. In Birmingham City University there are a lot of facilities that we could use to achieve the final result, we decided on screen printing the bags, we chose white as we felt it would stand out more and with the screen printing effect the white would give a really nice textured outcome – Ben liked the idea of ‘not being perfect’, he said if the screen printing doesn’t come out perfect this would add an edge to the bags and the brand.
PROMOTION When the designs were complete and the printing of the flyers was done and delivered, we began to spread them around Birmingham. The flyers were placed in locations like IKON gallery and BCU, this alone was great promotion for us as designers. We were also featured on ‘Created in Birmingham’ on a post that spoke about upcoming festivals, they spoke about how ‘squares and oblongs are in’, this was great as not only were the designs well fitting to Still Walking, the squares and oblong designs were keeping Still Walking modern and up to date for 2014. The experience with Still Walking festival has been extremely valuable, not only have I created my first client website design and build, I have also gained a lot of promotion for myself through the designs with a pretty large audience seeing the work I have produced. Networking with Ben and his team has also been great, we met his marketing organiser Kate who took us through bits and bobs of the festival and places she wants Still Walking to reach.
Designed by Harriet Hamilton-Jones.