The Festival Annual (09) designed and printed in just three months.
Published by: Independents United
Art direction: Steve Price
Design: Nicolo Dante

Buy the book here:
www.festivalannual.com

Nine months to design a book? Teams of editors with endless corrections? No. The Festival Annual 09 was designed in just three months, with the final four chapters been designed in just one week before the print deadline.

It was the brainchild of the Independents United (IU) agency, who appointed me to art direct and design their first, self-published book. The Annuals' content was largely user-generated in the form of tweets, photographs and submissions to their Myspace and Facebook profiles.

Independents United (IU) wanted to celebrate this voyage, en-masse and set about finding a publisher to produce and distribute their Festivals Annual. But, as with other industries, the Publishing sector has it’s own way of doing things and deterred by their overly-lengthy development timings UI decided to take matters in to their own hands and design, publish and distribute the book themselves; which in itself is highly commendable.

You only had to see the first few photographs to know that this was going to be a vibrant, exciting book; full of character - literally! This was a great project to work on. There were non of the typical publishing-company-chains-of-command, editors, or (more invitingly) months of corrections. We started the design in June and completed the whole book by mid-September. The key was being able to work closely with UI in setting up a rigid grid and typographical style that would make it easy for us to produce as we got nearer to the deadline - seven days after the final festival!

Frank Lampen, Creative Director of Independents United, says: “The brief to Steve [Plan-B Studio] was to create something which wasn't "over-designed" as we wanted the photos to be the real stars of each page. But at the same time it was really important for the book to have an identity of its own. Steve came up with a design that managed to take these two directions and find a happy place for them to meet. The concept for the whole project was bold, distinctive and fun, and the published book really has that feel - which, I guess, is the definition of good design."