Designing the 2018 Irish AeroPress Championship Poster
Published on the 3fe Blog, August 2018
Since 2008, the World AeroPress Championship has been held all over the world, and has attracted fans and contestants worldwide. It’s an annual coffee making competition that doesn’t take itself too seriously. Run by independent hosts across 60 countries, the events culminate in the World AeroPress Championship Final.
Our friends at 3FE have hosted the Irish AeroPress Championship for the last two years and this year they asked us to design the poster.
WorkGroup has been involved with 3fe from the start, working on the visual identity, branding and a host of other outputs. We also designed and built the 3fe sites for retail and wholesale along the way. I took the lead on this collaborative process with other designers in the studio.
We knew that the poster had to be an eye-catching, striking image that would pique the interest of both those involved in the coffee making world world and also the regular viewer.
The poster is a typographic illustration, something that allows us to combine the message and medium in a layout. Placing the word ‘Aeropress’ on its side creates a sense of playfulness and allows the typography to become an abstract representation of the device. The bold use of green, black and white create high contrast and alludes to the fact that it’s the Irish Aeropress championship while avoiding the typically used trope of green, white and orange to represent Irishness.
We modified a typeface called Fit for the Aeropress motif, with Sharp Grotesk used for the competition information. Both fonts are either variable or come in a huge range of widths and weights, allowing us to depict the sense of movement in an Aeropress. Combined together, the result is an abstract typographic representation of an the device that portrays both the pressure that is created in the process of making coffee with an Aeropress and also the tension and excitement of competition.
On our way to the final version, we went through a number of iterations. Some of the earlier versions were more representative of an actual Aeropress while others were more graphically captivating. The final poster was a combination that incorporated the best of both worlds and resulted in a playful poster that still had graphic impact. Some of the previous compressed iterations, where no information was included, were used as a framing device for social media posts and for the 3fe site.
