Responses by Briton Smith, creative director, Omse

Background: The aim of the project was to announce the event venue Printworks London’s autumn and winter lineup in a new and engaging way, as many people haven’t experienced this interactive technology before. Our audience is the Printworks London community—people who value progressive art and culture.

Reasoning: The Printworks London identity was based on the venue’s heritage as Western Europe’s largest printing factory, so we built on this concept to create bold black- and-white 3-D typographic designs based on the cylindrical rollers used on traditional printing presses. We wanted to create impactful pieces of print that could come to life as interactive 3-D experiences.

Challenges: Designing for augmented reality (AR) is challenging as it essentially combines many different disciplines such as typography, motion, 3-D, spatial and experiential design. You need to consider how each piece will look in print, how it will move and how engaging it will be as an AR experience for the end user.

Favorite details: The creative really ties into concept behind the Printworks London brand and brings it to life in a new and unexpected way that is a great fit for the brand and the target audience.

Specific demands: It’s a challenge coordinating an app release with a traditional print campaign. There are lots of interlinked pieces of technology and deliverables that need to be simultaneously released and work in unison. Each piece depended on another to function properly and make the experience as seamless as possible. With this project, we were working with Printworks London’s brand identity, which is predominately black and white; so designing with these constraints required us to rethink how we designed each scene in 3-D depth.

Anything new: AR is an emerging field, particularly when combined with graphics and typography, so we are always learning something new. Different types of motion and 3-D depth play a big role in how captivating a typographic AR piece will be.

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