I recently attended Leeds Print Festival which celebrates traditional and contemporary print process through type and image. The one day event which was held at Leeds College of Music had a programme of exhibitions and talks covering all print disciplines. The talks especially delivered a dose of inspiration whilst drawing attention to print and it’s importance in contemporary design culture.
To start with the first guest of the festival, DR.ME. Both Mark and Ryan of DR.ME were cool and laid back guys but was I fully expecting that due to they’re style and practice of collage. Their talk was funny as it included some anecdotes from their past adventures such as landing an internship with mike perry in New York and hosting an exhibition in which they had make friends stay in a 4 man tent on site of the show, as mike perry refused to let them stay with him. The main focus of the talk was about curation even though its a small part of their practice but I could see how much they developed from early curation. Such as ones they set in university compared to ones in New York and Manchester. This was encouraging to see how they started off and improved upon each time of hosting an event.
Ali Hanson of ItsNiceThat was next up and seeing the process of Printed Pages was great. Finding out that idea process only takes 2 days and they aim to relate the cover to world affairs. He talked about the design process which takes 2 weeks which was surprising and its all seems very hands on. During the talk ali talked about how printed pages is now requested in Japan and Taiwan and he hopes to push the readership into European cities outside the major metropolitan areas. Then during the panel he talked about how he looks for especially graphic design work to feature that is elsewhere than the Uk and named Gent in Belgium for an example. Personally I think he must be looking in more niche places such as Gent to potentially further ItsNiceThat’s reach in Europe. Yes interesting work is happening in Uk but ItsNiceThat readership is most likely the biggest in the UK so featuring more diverse work from across Europe may entice people in the smaller cities to follow itsNiceThat more and potentially buy Printed Pages.
Pat Bradbury was after Ali and Pats talk was really interesting as he focused on education more than anything and how print can be used to teach and provoke. He delved into his adventures and how he used his collage style to help a school in Vietnam and and a town at crossroads in Iceland. His advice was to look at schemes abroad to broader your horizons after university and you never know where you might end up. The last talk of the day was from Macroy Smith, the founder of People of Print. Macroy talked a lot about the business side of print and how he set up People of Print, it was interesting to have an insight into the posterzines that People of Print make as they've become more popular than Print isnt dead (People of Print magazine).
I then went along to Colours May Vary to check out the exhibition curated by DR.ME which has some excellent designs from a range of creatives. My personal favourite was from Guy Featherstone who I researched as a part of context of practice as his work is mainly in the electronic music scene for Diagonal records.
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