The final piece of material we designed for the Colchester Film Festival was the official programme.

The volume of submissions to the festival exceeded what the organisers were expecting (probably due to the brilliant branding and advertising, right?) and meant that they had their work cut out deciding which films were going to be shown. This led to the judging process taking longer than expected and the content for the programme being delivered to us much later than originally planned. With the festival opening looming, we were left with two and a half days to design the programme to meet the print deadline.

While we had already been thinking about a few ideas for how it could look, we knew that the final design would have to be informed by the content in terms of how much imagery and information we could fit in. The number of events and masterclasses had also increased from what we were originally expecting meaning we had to be careful with the amount of content on each page.

We settled on a layout which took inspiration from the filmstrip idea we had used in the advertising. Each page was divided up into two columns with the text and imagery cascading downwards, created an uneven edge at the bottom and mirroring our original teaser poster.

The use of colour also played an important part with different colours again being used to separate out each genre, as well as show a distinction between film screenings, masterclasses and events. Rather than just colour-code the typography we also applied a colour mask to the imagery in each section to reinforce the division.

We finished off with a timetable laying out the entirety of the weekends festivities in a clear way and a bespoke illustrated map highlighting the venues where events were taking place on the back cover.

The programme was printed on lovely uncoated paper by Colourplan in the nearby town of Ipswich. They were kind enough to offer a discount in return for including their logo on the thanks and sponsor page and did a fantastic job with the printing.

All of the work we did for the festival was well received and both me and Sam were very happy with the outcome. Hopefully we’ll be lucky enough for the organisers to use our services again next year.