JUMP's October Creative Challenge

Following on from the success of our last Creative Challenge day, the design team at JUMP was eager for the next brief. The purpose of the Creative Challenge is to let our designers flex their creative muscles without limitation; the only constraint is time as we aim to have the Challenge completed within the day.

This month’s brief was to create a typographic response to an article of the designers’ choosing. Much like the bakery branding brief of the previous Challenge, this brief was kept deliberately open-ended to allow for a wide range of interpretations. As you will see, the outputs were indeed varied and spoke volumes about our designers’ interests and tastes.

Andy Baxter

Andy is an avid runner, regularly taking part in events like the Snowdonia Marathon Eryri. His response focused on running, taking the form of a magazine-style publication. Called ‘Bonk’ after the metaphorical wall some runners face, the look of the magazine was inspired by the Nike brand and designer Neville Brody with bold typography conveying a sense of movement throughout.

Danielle Stone

Danielle based her publication on Reni Eddo-Lodge’s ‘Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race.’ What started out as a blog post by Eddo-Lodge in 2014 quickly became a Sunday Times bestselling book and winner of numerous awards. With a chapter of the book as her starting point, Danielle took a trip to the Baltic library for some inspiration. Finding a book on feminist protest posters from the 1970s-90s, she was inspired by the cut and paste style, creating a hand-drawn font from the posters.

Adrian Martin

Our designer Adrian has forged a successful career outside of JUMP as a drag queen following his win of Newcastle’s Drag Idol 2019 competition. The article he chose was ‘Queens behind the scenes: A look inside the bedrooms of some of Newcastle's drag queens’ which was recently published in the Newcastle Chronicle. The look Adrian, or should we say Choriza May, wore for the article was that of a clown, complete with a rhinestone red nose. Adrian’s publication took inspiration from the circus theme, with bold polka dot patterns overlaying the images. Adrian also worked with three colour separations in the style of a riso print. The last page of Adrian’s publication features hateful comments made online wherever the article was published. Instead of taking the comments personally, he sees them as motivation to keep going and prove the haters wrong.

Rachel Alexander

Rachel found an essay titled ‘The Road Forward, The Road Back: Vogler’s Hero’s Journey as Represented by Rey and Ben Solo in Star Wars’ as a starting point for her publication. As a fervent fan of the Star Wars saga, Rachel’s choice of source material came as no surprise to the rest of the team. Inspired by the theme of ‘balance’ which is heavily featured in the films, Rachel utilised white space and a limited colour palate in her response to the brief.

At our final Creative Challenge presentation at the end of the day, it was noted how personal each response was, both in terms of subject matter and the designs themselves. Having the opportunity to break from the day-to-day running of the studio and create something to our own mind is liberating. The Creative Challenge encourages us to challenge the brief and to push the boundaries of what’s expected, whether that’s client expectations or our own. Here’s to the next one!