VA / Laneway Festival Market

In mid January of the new year, we were asked to come up with some ideas on printed materials for our friends over at VA for a special day-out at St Jerome’s Laneway Festival 2009, Sydney. A designers market was being put together by the team at TwoThousand along with the festival where VA will be having a stall named VA Select, providing some exciting products for the crowd.

After receiving much more information, this occasion for VA Select was actually an one-off appearance, aiming to promote their flagship store as well as sharing a selected range of products under a selected brand - in this case, a photography accessories label from Japan. We love the idea of relationships between mother and child, and in this case, a flagship store and an one-off select stall. Basing on this idea, we came up with an twin posters concept.

Two A1 size poster designs have been created which share the same grid, a certain amount of identical graphic elements while one of them were given a typograhic twist. For the first poster (below, on the left) contains background information about the name VA, what they do and why a stall at the festival. On the second poster, we have decided to maintain what we have done and to further experiment with the title and placement of the remaining elements.
Firstly, a paragraph of text on the label were being placed at the same text area as the first poster. After that , we turned the title ‘We Are VA Select’ into ‘We Select PowerShovel’ by introducing the positive/negative space, highlighting the name of the label.

Apart from the typographic design on the posters, we have also placed a strip of short diagonal lines at the bottom of each poster in which those lines were decomposed fragments from the original VA logo. The particular angle of those lines, when being put together, reminded us about those ‘Do Not Cross’, ‘Caution’ plastic strips and signs painted on roads which being used to catch pedestrians’ or drivers’ attention. We though this visual element was matching really well with the name of the event ‘Laneway Festival’ as well as the one-off appearance of the stall.

Shown above is a mockup image of how we see the twin posters concept working together, creating an visual excitement that would catch attention as well as providing the appropriate amount of information.

We would like to thank Nadia Saccardo, a wonderful friend/editor/writer of ours, for helping us on refining the text for these posters.