Project summary

After exploring a few options based on certain years at Spike Island, we decided to focus on the yearly event, Spike Island Open Studio’s after finding the leaflets and being inspired by the idea behind them and their varying design.

The yearly May Open weekend is an opportunity for the public to see behind the scenes. Over the three days visitors can explore the areas of the building that are normally closed to the public and meet the people who work in these spaces. The studios and offices of artists, designers, filmmakers, animators, printmakers and other creative practitioners based here are open. You can see their work and have a chat with them about what they do. 

For our dimensions we decided to go no larger than A4 in overall size, but inside each yearly section, had an A4 double sided folded page (reducing it to A5 overall) which would include pictures and information from that year. The A5 pages would lie centered bottom of the over all A3 spread, framing the content pages.

The A4 content spread were white and spacious in design to reflect the gallery vast white spaces. And juxtaposed with the A3 years spreads.

We wanted to encompass elements from the original leaflets, and decided in our  A3 year spread designs to sample the colours and styles from the original leaflets from that particular year. We each designed 3 or 4 pages between us but using the Spike leaflets as inspiration. 

To complete the designs we decided we wanted the year designs to have a more working art studio feel to it, and therefore included brush strokes, ink splatters and film images to complete the designs and make it feel more like a collaboration of art ideas and elements.

For the font we look a variety of options, keeping in mind that we wanted something simple as to not detract from the design. After looking at a few we unanimously decided we like the font “Quicksand”.

The rationale behind the cover design was that it’s a collaboration ideas. Therefore taking a ring from each years design means you instantly get a taste for what’s to come and everyone is included.

We faced a few issues throughout the process. For example in the beginning we couldn’t get a lot of info on some years and on others images and leaflets were missing entirely. This was also he case for 2006 when Spike was undergoing construction and the open did not run. We felt it would be wrong to miss out the year entirely and therefore decided to dedicate that page to the refurbishment.

To overcome most of the difficulties we got in contact with Charlotte from Spike Island via email, and togteher set up a dropbox account so we could easily exchange any missing information.

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