I’ve been designing and producing the poster and web graphics for MissImp since we re-started our monthly shows in 2008. I’m not going to show you the first poster we used. It’s a horrible child’s spattering of Microsoft Word objects. It shames me.

A style started to emerge from January 2009 with The Knights of Jamalot. For a long time we’d choose a title and them for the monthly show, like Improv Torture, Lilo, Sizzle and Twister. The  better posters seemed to coincide with better shows – don’t you just love spotting patterns that aren’t really there? The theme of the show helped sometimes too – Improv Storm produced the memorable Queen intro by the audience.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbBQeEC2g40&w=425&h=349]

I think a good poster can add a lot to promotion of events and although we don’t theme our shows much anymore (having for now settled on a format we like) we’ve been going for clarity and coolness. Having a logo helped with that too – and the now iconic fairy (I wish) seemed a natural choice which then sorted out the website imagery.

Poster design is lots of fun – I especially enjoy digital manipulation and can be found late at night fiddling away in my lap… top. Blissfully others are willing to indulge my design pretensions for plays (Lloydie’s stuff), Pub Poetry and all the artwork for Captain Pigheart’s stories.

Most recently I’ve been doing the endless variations needed for HR’d Day’s Night‘s Fringe run – flyers, posters, banner designs for web stuff, t-shirts. It’s all good fun though. The Captain and his stories has a pretty constant demand for variations on a theme as well as new bits and bobs, often cobbled together from oddments off t’web.

I’ve been messing about with posters since I was at school for plays and the odd gig. Back then it was either on my Amigo 500 or later my 286 PC with an ancient copy of CorelDraw to do posters for The Tempest and The Changeling. Awesome fun. Now I do most of the posters using Paint.Net – a free an entirely splendid program. Unfortunately like most free stuff you can only really do RGB colours which is fine for on-screen and printing at work, but CMYK is the print shop standard. So now I’m also playing with Adobe Photoshop – a steep but enjoyable learning curve.

I hope you like my stuff – you can find it all over the MissImp website and captainpigheart.com. Should you really like it and want some – a design for yourself or summat, just let me know.