22 Nov Street Fair Graphic Design
The artwork promoting Glebe Street Fair and Newtown Festival are both standouts.
They make good case studies of what to do when you need to design something with a large amount of information.
Newtown Festival 
The designer of this event has been given a lot of information to include on a simple promotional poster.
We have:
- Festival name
- Organiser (Newtown Neighbourhood Centre Inc)
- Key attractions (writers tent; market stalls; kids zone; dog show; live music)
- Entry by gold coin donation
- Sponsor logos
It could easily have been a mess. Instead, the designer has used a centred, vintage carnivalesque design with a simple colour palette of earthy and burnt orange, and a soft mint green as the highlight colour. The desaturated colours give the appropriate vintage look, which appeals to the local population.
The flags also communicate community, backyard, and low-key.
The featured image is the bicycle – a style popular in Newtown.
Through the use of layers, the designer has added the symbols of marquees and trees in orange with about 50 per cent opacity behind the bicycle.
All the logos, which need a solid colour background, have been placed at the bottom on the green park.
The use of th oval shaped park also adds visual interest. As does the green hanging pendant in the bottom layer. Do you see the white arrow the negative space makes above the bicycle?
If you looked at the bicycle first (I did), you then see an arrow indicating where to look next (the name of the event at the top).
Whether you notice them as a viewer or not is unimportant. The design subconsciously leads the eye to the important information.
Kudos to the designer, very nice job.
Glebe St Fair
Just like the Newtown Festival, Glebe St Fair designer has given a tonne of information to include in the poster design.
Instead of chunky boxes everywhere, they have used a sky theme and a retro design. Again, a simple colour pallette of blue and black makes it a very elegant design piece.
It has made the simple banner box ‘Glebe St Fair’ an oddly shaped rhombus, which draws attention. The clouds creeping over the borders also break up the consistency of the rectangle, making it more noticeable.
The blue bird sitting up top on the word Fair might encourage Tweeting but also conveys that this is a community fair, involving everyone.
The web address and ’34 years’ are communicated through the vintage plane’s ribbon sky trail. The plane becomes part of the design, flying over towards the signpost that indicates all the selling points of the fair.
Event Design Lessons
- Decide on a theme that helps convey the spirit of the event. Use elements of the theme to add visual interest as well as showcase important features.
- Stick with a simple colour palette.
- Be aware of where the eye will lead. Lines can guide the viewer where to look.
- Put logos on a solid background (e.g. black, white, or another colour). Gradients and changing tones will contravene most logo style guides.
- Use layers so that the artwork looks more dimensionally, rather than flat.
- Trust your intuition.