Visual Playground – Day1

I spent the end of July and the beginning of August 2017 in Bucharest, taking part in the Visual Playground workshops. This is a visual diary of sorts, accompanied by field notes and photos. Many thanks to the organizers for making this possible and a shout out to the awesome artists who were my colleague these ten days.

Day one was Steve Simpson – I have been following his work for ages and felt slightly jealous whenever I saw pictures from his workshops. So you can imagine my excitement when I got to attend :).

Photo credits: Cătălin Georgescu

Our task was to design a beer-bottle label, back and front, with the keywords being wolf, forest and fairy tales. We could count on Steve’s help, but everything had to be done by hand (from the illustration to the lettering to the bar-code on the back!) and at the end of eight hours the labels had to be glued to the bottles (kindly provided by Silva). Here’s what the end result looked like:

Photo credits: Cătălin Georgescu

And bellow you will find a process gif of my design. Each change is Steve coming round and saying, hey, that name works better, you don’t need the red flame, and you also don’t need the dot :D. Thank you, sempai!

Stuff I learned: I enjoyed the challenge and got a tremendous satisfaction seeing the finished product as a real object. But most of all, being a freelancer for such a long time, I didn’t even realize I missed the company of other people, working on the same assignment. I tend to think my ideas are… well… obvious (ahem, I mean a bit unoriginal), so it was a pleasant surprise to see that no, twenty four people came with twenty four different designs, all of them great.