Kate Pritchard’s playful approach to composition is anything but predictable

There’s some paths you expect to lead to a career in graphic design, but one that’s perhaps less expected is a degree in English language and linguistics. But that was exactly the precursor to Kate Pritchard’s design studies at Shillington, and now freelance work as a designer and illustrator. Rather than seeing the two eras as separate, Kate views them as very much intertwined, the “analytical approach to storytelling” she gained during the former leading naturally to the latter. Still you can find references and allusions to literature in Kate’s work, like Swan 2 Study, for example, which takes prompts from W.B Yeat’s poem The Wild Swans At Coole.

Kate approaches client and personal work in much the same way, experimenting with a number of different techniques from digital airbrush to painting, but what really makes her work stand out is her compositions, which she describes as “absurd or whimsy”. Take her poster for a vintage pop-up (below, left), which sees the type running off the side of the poster, cutting off the elegant lettering adornments. Or, her poster for Parched Wine (below, right), which shows imagery of grapes, bottles and glasses almost drunkenly bumping into each other and overlapping. This offbeat approach to composition leads to a sense of surrealism and a dreamlike feeling, often accentuated by her looking for “little hidden nuggets” of inspiration outside of the design sphere, like a pawn shop in Manchester. “I used to go all the time and I’d leave with odd bits like old religious sermon handouts and vintage tea card sets,” she ends. “Some I never use, but some come in really handy.”