Over the past few years I’ve worked with my fair share of design agencies and freelance designers / illustrators in Brighton and further afield, but few have been up to the standard of recent work with Serial Cut and Helen Musselwhite on a new project for Audio, Brighton.

When I first moved to Brighton, back in 2006, I managed to make some great friends who were involved in the events promotion industry locally or worked directly for local nightclubs. Pretty quickly I picked up a few pieces of poster design for these guys, which slotted into quite a hectic freelance schedule at the time, but which were genuinely fun and really useful in providing a canvas for more experimental and outsider artwork. Anyone who works in Graphic Design for largely very corporate clients will know that small projects like these are just ideal for cutting your teeth on, not to mention helping get your name around locally.

Audio, Brighton

I’d been unable to work on many similar projects since ’06-’07, so when an opportunity came up to propose a concept for a series of new promotional material for Audio bar and nightclub in Brighton, I snapped it up. Audio have a history of really strong design, having commissioned local heros Red Design to brand the relaunched club when it changed identity a few years ago. But since then it seems that assets had been lost and best laid plans had fallen at the wayside, which can easily happen to any small business that moves at a fast pace and works with a lot of individual designers of varying quality across a stack of different media.

So after a little research and a few phone calls I had a set of assets back in place at least for poster and flyer material including some basic templates Red Design had built. I made a proposition to the club suggesting a campaign of six months of fresh new material that would work inside Red’s existing brand structure, but really bring it bang up to date by introducing world class, in-vogue illustrators, photographers, and designers to really shake things up a bit.

Audio’s brand is quite minimal and rigid. The logo has two variants, one that uses squares with various corners sliced to create letterforms, the other being straight typography and takes advantage of one of my favorite typefaces - Akzidenz Grotesk, which of course is a precursor to Helvetica and always a pleasure to work with (geeky – I know!). What I really wanted to do was get a human touch into the artwork somewhere, something a little more natural and just plain friendlier, to give it a different edge from previous campaigns. In the end I decided that to specify how this worked would be too prescriptive in briefing the actual artwork, so instead I simply tried to limit those I approached to work on the project to agencies and individuals who always used an element of the handmade or physically tangible in their work. Beyond that, I briefed artworkers mainly just to react to the club name and month and / or season in which the promotion would run.

Serial Cut

After some discussion, I’d managed to secure one of my favorite agencies of the moment – Madrid based Serial Cut, for the first month of the project – something I can put down only to their fantastic nature of good will. Anyone who’s been paying any attention to design blogs or industry news over the past couple of years will have seen Serial Cut out there pushing really cutting edge work, largely in photography and 3D modeled composites. Their style and aesthetic that seems to filter into all of their work is truly inspired and brings with it a subtle sense of humor, but has since been replicated by any number of less original or imaginative agencies – you’ll just have to trust me that these guys had it going since way back!

Serial Cut delivered two first rate pieces involving some great looking objects – impressive crystalline forms (that they just had lying around?!), CDs, speakers and a littering of tiny model figures dancing, ice skating or even flashing the viewer! These were all photographed in-studio and retouched digitally with 3D typography added. The finished work is really beautiful, well executed and has a great sense of irony to it too – easily strong enough to draw some great reactions from Audio staff and customers alike.  By the way this also arrived in absolutely record breaking time and was handled with real enthusiasm throughout – so refreshing to work with!

Helen Musselwhite

September’s design was handled by Helen Musselwhite, someone I knew altogether a lot less about, but who’s work really struck me on a CR Blog article around the same time. I had thought that Serial Cut’s turn around the previous month was a rush, but Helen constructs pieces by hand, cutting and sticking a big selection of high quality paper stocks into scenes of real beauty and with heavy attention to detail and finishing – something that’s physically laborious and definitely very time consuming.

Helen also completed two pieces for the project, both working with some great quality materials – paper stocks of really subtle varying tones and textures, building these fantastic scenes of flowers and plant life – with this really characterful bird, and just so immaculately executed. Her work has a certain feel to it that’s difficult to describe. For some reason I see it in a similar light to children’s books, like Dr Seuss’ Cat in the Hat for example – not in terms of illustration style but purely that they’re both beautifully executed but have an underlying sinister tone running in there somewhere. Somehow Helen managed to sum up the feeling of a September evening with the sun drawing in so well.

Brighton Nightclubs

These two campaigns were a big success and I hope more will be to come. Sadly the six month plan hit a delay due to staff changes over at Audio, but at least these two stand alone as great finished pieces of work. It was a pleasure to work with both Helen and Serial Cut – they’re really inspiring people.

As I walked through the Laines today I standardly had at least 5 flyers thrust in my direction, all of which were pretty unappealing. I think that artists working on promotional materials for clubs, especially in Brighton, could really learn to stretch things a lot further by challenging the type of image they use, connecting it to a stronger concept and grounding it with some more adventurous material choices once in a while. There’s a lot of very similar posters and flyers in the world… let’s shake things up a little!!

Flyers and posters really do say something about your night and about your club. There’s more to running a night than just making a booking – it’s about the whole picture. Club owners, think about supporting individual nights who struggle with this, after all they directly represent your brand at street level.