Freaky Food Festival – Blog

During my second year studying Graphic Media Design at Grafisch Lyceum Utrecht, I was tasked with creating three posters for the Freaky Food Festival. The theme of the festival was open to interpretation, as long as it was something freaky and related to food.

Personally, I have always been a big fan of sea creatures; to observe, learn about, create art with, or even cook with. I also believe that there are many seafood species that most people avoid but are perfectly fine to eat, and some are even delicious!

I started with many sketches and ideas, which I later narrowed down to two core words: Freaky Seafood and Italian Cuisine. For the posters I made three concepts: something with a seashell, something with a fish head, and something with an octopus.

Shell of Plenty

I started working on the shell. I wanted to combine the mythological Cornucopia or Horn of Plenty with the wealth of seafood, mixed in an italian sauce.

I worked in Photoshop and created in a couple hours this piece. The shell is one from my own collection at home, the rest are stock images.

In search of a head

So. A fishhead. How do we tackle that?

I decided pretty quickly that I didn’t just want an online image of a fish head. No, I wanted the real thing. So I went to my local fishmonger, and lo and behold, they had a salmon head in stock.

I took it home for the incredibly low price of 1 euro. I took photos of it in its raw state, then cooked it to make fish stock—that’s what fish heads are perfect for!

Once it was cooked, I took it back out and took more shots. And then I ate it. Well, i started on it, then realised i could take off his skin….. That’s how I got my 3th poster. He was quite delicious though.

Poster design

The next lessons I spend creating the poster designs for these fishheads. Quite quickly I ran into a problem: what to do with the Shell of Plenty? The artwork of that piece didn’t really fit in with the fishheads.

So I made the descicion to leave the shell behind and view it as a seperate artpiece. While I really like it, the fishheads where simply more impressive and better suited for this project. You can view it in more detail here.

The first poster went through a total of 17 versions. I asked for feedback from both students and teachers throughout the process. I made another big change, switching the entire typography from orange to the colors of the Italian flag. One of my teachers said it looked like “the Fish goes to Africa,” and then I couldn’t unsee it. And since one of my core themes was Italian cuisine after all, this fit much better.

After I settled on a final style, the other posters where a piece of cake.

Final thoughts

I am really proud of what I managed to create in the timespan of 8 weeks. This truly felt like one of my best project this year. I created a poster series that felt unique, fresh and like nothing anyone else of the classes had made. And it felt like some I made.

If you know me, then you know this breathes Jonas. I really like it. In this project, I also finally learned from earlier mistakes and made decisive decisions when necessary, without becoming sentimental about previous work.

And now I can only see “the Fish goes to Italy,” and I’m more than happy with that.