End Of Year Show Concept Pitch

I missed the briefing of this so thought I wouldn't get involved. But Aimee was asking for ideas and help with her idea for it one day and I realised I did want to do this brief  a lot.

Brief - 

The competition invites Leeds College of Art students to design the concept and promotional materials for the annual end of year show that takes place from 10 - 16 June 2015. It will also include the Foundation End of Year show which takes place 19-26 May.The winning design will be applied to a suite of promotional materials develop by the marketing team and Peter & Paul.


Aimee and I teamed up to produce this idea of using birthday balloons, confetti etc. After doing the photoshoot of the balloons and confetti Aimee decided she didn't need me. Which was annoying because I thought it was a partnership, but I couldn't blame her because we were working on her idea.

So instead of just not doing the brief at all, I thought up new ideas and began work on it on the Sunday, the day before the deadline. I wished it was earlier but that was all the time left after working with Aimee. 


I began research looking at past winners of the brief, other uni degree shows, show branding etc. 

Looking through end of year show branding and degree show branding, there was a mix of styles, influences and colour. 

I had my own ideas when I was working with Aimee. I really wanted to make posters that were really full of colour, contrasting or harmonic colours that would catch people's eyes. A lot of the posters will be on those poster boards around town and Hyde Park. There's a lot of posters on them that use bright, fluorescent colours.

Because of the time constraint I had to just roll with my strongest idea and get it done. 

The end of year show is the main event of the academic year. Working alone on this brief pitch I thought about how the college as affected me personally. I think that it changes you and teaches you so many things. So this what I wanted to show through the posters etc.

To show the change you go through at LCA I used my hands facing one way and then the other. 

I used my housemate Lauren as a model as well. I wanted to show the change with her eyes. Using photos with her eyes open and shut. 

I took a range of photos of Tom. With him siting and standing, this allowed me to have a lot of different aspects when putting the posters together. 

From there I edited them with a lot of colour and overlaid the images. The doubling up of images idea came from City and Colour's new posters. I think it looks really good, its interesting and makes people stop and look at it.

I edited all the images in black and white because it made it easier to see the two different images.  And the images are going to have a colour filter in them, so can not be natural colour.

It was difficult trying to get a good double exposure look to these images. I decided because it looks too busy, confusing and messy, that using just Tom's face would be a lot more effective. 

I quickly decided the eyes idea really didn't work. Quite a demonic image has been created. 

I worked through a range of colours to understand what looked good. I realised that using a dark colour wouldn't work. I needed to use a colour filter so the colour would work with the image. The colouring needed to be developed a bit before applying another colour with it. Both colours had to be nice separately and together.

It was a lot easier working my hands and Tom's face. Adding the colour was really fun, they're just any colours that I thought would contrast well enough to be digestible. Or colours where they're harmonic and create a good image. 

I realised that lighter, more summer colours were going to work better after I used this darker blue and bright orange. The colours had to bright because this would be going up around May time. The weather is warmer, summer is about to start so I wanted to think about that and show it in my designs.

When it came to making the posters I really struggled with a tagline - which isn't like me. But I carried on with the overall design and then did come up with a tagline.

There was a lot of experimenting with tag lines and fonts. This was actually useful because it got me to use white type and  san serif font. I think the white works a lot better with the colours, if I used black it would been too dark and harsh against these bright colours. 

Typeface Used

 The name of the campaign I deiced to go with was, 'Wait, What? 170'. 

It’s a tribute to the age of the school, because it is a long time for one educational institution to keep going. However, it also a humorous way to comment on the end of the programme for all students, as it can be daunting, life after Leeds College of Art.

I think it's a very natural thought to have after finishing a program here, like, 'wait, what?' we're done? How did that happen!

The campaign tagline is 'LEEDS COLLEGE OF ART BRINGS YOU THE FINAL WORKS FROM GRADUATING STUDENTS', it explains easily exactly what the event is about.