For this project I wanted to base it on something I was passionate about and close to my heart, so I chose to base it around an ongoing project my friends and I have been working on for the last 2 years; BEARDYFEST!
BeardyFest is an event that we hope one day will become a successful festival. We celebrate talents across the arts, focusing on live music and local acts as well as exhibiting artists of all types and encouraging contributions from any discipline . As creative director my role is to decorate the space available and create an interactive, psychedelic, entertaining environment for our customers to enjoy, including curation the contributing art works.
To see more about Beardyfest please visit our Facebook page and watch this year’s newly released after video! : https://www.facebook.com/Beardyfest2017/
I started to think about what Beardyfest means to me in order to create some designs:
*Community– we have made such a tight knit group through this project and brought so many people together, those who are willing to lend a hand or have a talent to contribute, we welcome them all and its amazing how many people are willing to come together to make this amazing event with us. As well as all those who attended the event, we are proud to have united people with peace love and music.
*Expressing ourselves, individually and as a collective- We are celebrating talent of all different types providing a platform for artists that needs to be shown to the world.
*Spreading love and happiness- our aim is to bring as many smiles to as many faces as possible. We have spent years going to festivals as customers but our dream is to provide that level of bliss and connection to hundreds (and hopefully thousands) of people. Seeing people laughing and enjoying the creation you have slaved over is unbelievably rewarding.
*Hard work and organisation- Beardyfest is all about hedonism and being free to be true to yourself, celebrating us all individually as well as together. However a whole year of hard work, stress, arguments, let downs and ALOT of organisation goes into creating an event like this.
My first design:
I wanted the concentric circles to be separate rings that when pushed reveal writing around the edge, I wanted this featured on my medal as it fits a key brief specification of considering the edge. Each ring would represent the key pillars that are needed for this magical event to actually happen. I would then put a quote of some sort on the back to encapsulate my love for this event. I chose the pattern of leaves and flowers around the edge as I took inspiration from a sign I made for Beardyland for customers as they entered.
I wanted to improve the design so tried changing the font and outer pattern. Beardyfest is all about the psychedelic aesthetic so I took inspiration from Art Nouveau designs and patterns as during the psychedelic, hippie, movement of the 1960’s they drew many aspects of their style from the patterns of Art Nouveau.
I really enjoyed this pattern but thought it may be very difficult to sculpt from clay. I had a tutorial to ask advice and I was told that maybe it was too obvious, more like a piece of merchandise from the festival rather than encapsulating the feeling and sentiment behind it. I also realised that due the process of bronze casting making concentric circles that fit perfectly inside one another in such a short time frame would be extremely difficult. I also considered the fact that I had no way holding this rings together so when handled they would fall apart. So I went back over pictures from the day and reconsidered my design.
These are just a few of my favourite images from this years Beardyfest. I chose them as I feel they really encapsulate the feeling from the day, and I realised that what Beardyfest is really about is all of those happy faces. Seeing how we can bring so much joy to so many people, of all different ages, genders, races and religions is the main reason we started this amazing project, and thats what I want to try and put into my design.
I started by image searching a few key words such as together, community, we are one etc. for inspiration. I found a lot of logos like these which I thought looked a lot like a medal already. However they didnt really scream ‘festival’ and ‘love’ and ‘joy’ enough so I made a few more designs.
My designs:
Liked the sentiment behind this but felt it didn’t scream festival enough.
tried to replicate people in a crowd with this one, I also included our logo and alot of smiling faces but I felt it still did not encapsulate all that i wanted to say. I realised that maybe imagery was not enough to describe the sentiment behind the medal so I decided to play with text.
I really liked this design as it says more about the meaning behind the medal but even if someone who didn’t know what Beardyfest was, would understand the message and the sentiment. Although I didnt enjoy the font as it isnt in keeping with the style of beardy fest so I tried a different design.
I tried this font and made a life sized paper and clay mock up. I got feedback on my mock ups and was told that they no longer resembled a medal very much so I looked up the definition of a medal in order to successfully hit the brief specification. The key part of the description described a circular disk. So I decided I would fit the font inside a circle in order to fit the specification.
Rhianna Yates- Maker Blog 