Every year in Knutsford Cheshire, there’s a costume parade and a fairground. To the people who live there and in the surrounding areas, it’s an annual event with huge significance. This is mainly because every year, besides a May Queen being selected to mark this event, people from Knutsford catch up with friends who have moved away or have ‘come out of the woodwork’; sometimes only seen during Christmas, Easter, other bank holidays and May Day.

The fairground is assembled on Knutsford Heath, which is transformed from an empty green field where children play and dogs are walked, to a construction made from spraypaint, steel and plywood, thousands of lightbulbs, rivets, nuts and bolts!

There’s something fascinating and exciting about fairgrounds, with their flashing lights, rides and straplines, loud music, mashup of sound, the smell of diesel and fast-food, and tacky imagery. All sorts of people come, from all walks of life and add to the colour and variation of the whole scene.

This year, I took a particular interest in the typography. It’s everywhere, ever present in the the names of the rides, pricing boards and safety notices, trying to entice customers to part with their pennies.

I love the atmosphere at fairgrounds, created by the sights, sounds and smells, so I grabbed my camera and captured a small part of it.

When browsing on the computer, I came across a few pieces that look like they were inspired by traditional fairground typography. This style is very popular at the moment and has been for some time now, in particular I have noticed it more on greeting and wedding stationery.

The wedding stationery was seen on personallyinvited.com I like how the black type is clearly seen on the white background and how it contrasts with the yellow stripes.

I love how the type and decorative graphic elements are positioned together. The type is centre aligned and there are contemporary distressed stars and dotted black fonts combined with more detailed type, including a pointing hand, plus both top and bottom swirly decorations. This piece was seen on notonthehighstreet.com

This piece is so simple yet lovely! The type is centrally placed within the sign in red and besides the typography contrasting against the white background, the surrounding lights around the edge will draw you in, focussing on what it is advertising. This sign was seen on graphiquefantastique.com

This image doesn’t display any typography, but I loved it anyway! The distressed textured background and the pink foreground foliage are lovely. There is lots of space surrounding the main focus – the merry-go-round and the young girl, who is engrossed in what looks like what she is eating?! A lot of old fairground signage is cracked and worn and this image demonstrates this. Could this mean that ‘old’ represents an element of ‘nostalgia’? This image was seen on cube-gallery.co.uk

I have been busy lately creating ideas for my wedding stationery, besides constantly researching dresses for myself and the bridesmaids, looking at all types of flowers and scrumptious cakes….

I have come up with a few styles, yet I am not too sure if I will use them.

Here are some samples of my designs so far.

This design has a decorative feel and I have kept to the colours in my partner’s kilt!

This design has a personal logo, which I could use on other stationery i.e. menus, order of service and thank you stationery etc… It has a more contemporary feel also.

I have used the same font style and composition as the 1st design idea and added a bold oval shape as a frame.

In this design, I have softened the colours and concentrated on typography and graphic elements.

For my next ideas, I would like to try adding imagery and experimenting with placing of text.