Harrison & Co creates Brighton Festival 2012 campaign
Harrison & Co has branded and art directed the campaign for this year’s Brighton Festival, which is being guest-directed by Vanessa Redgrave.
The consultancy, which has designed lead images for guest directors including Auung San Suu Kyi & Anish Kapoor in previous years, was this year asked to address Redgrave’s theatrical background, Greek mythology and Brighton’s sense of place, according to consultancy founder Chris Harrison.
Harrison says ‘Greek mythology features in the programming this year and we’ve brought Brighton out in the waves.’
The lead image is a photograph of Redgrave taken in 1969 by Victor Skrebneski. Harrison sourced the image and was given permission to manipulate it by Skrebneski’s studio.
‘All rendering and illustration has been done in-house’ says Harrison who adds, ‘There’s something of Botticelli’s Venus about it and the colourful hair gives it a festival feel.’
Further inspiration has been taken from vintage posters and art noveau – ‘particularly posters around the turn of the century 1890-1900,’ says Harrison.
The font, Pro New is a version of Progress which has been tweaked by type designers and then redrawn by Harrison & Co ‘to give it a more condensed poster feel,’ says Harrison.
A vintage poster effect was created ‘by mixing paper textures and brush filters before a little offsetting of the layers was added so the image didn’t look to exact,’ he adds.
The lead image forms the front of a 72 page festival brochure, designed by Harrison and Co, which will be unveiled in Brighton tomorrow, before featuring on posters in newspapers ads and street signage in the run up to the festival which starts on 5 May.
A stunning piece of artwork that cleverly captures the essense of Brighton Festival. I didn’t appreciate the illustration was in fact Vanessa herself, a beautiful image.