At the time of writing Pony Panto is a matter of weeks away (few tickets left themaclive.com). We are well on the way of producing a range of high quality unique merchandise, perfect for stocking…bla bla blah. Here’s a little insight into how it’s going.

Calendar

It’s ponydance tradition to whip up out own Cliff Richard style calendar. We’d collect a bunch of hilarious pictures from that year, send them off to the printers and they would add them to their own template, which wasn’t too bad but if you’re a designer you get a kick out of making everything to make yourself feel somewhat important.

I used a full page images and nice chunky Futura and I thought it looked great. My ethasusum for my own design was short lived when we got the calendars back from the printers… sigh, design for print is hard I’ve been doing it a while so I know all the typical pitfalls but you can’t guarantee the quality of the paper/printing, how the paper absorbs the ink etc, this is not necessarily the printers fault, it would just be nice to have the luxury of a few test prints.

But people really enjoyed the calendars, I did get some feedback on the design, that the image cover the whole page which makes the calendars less practical—adding birthdays and notes are less legible. So with all that in mind this years calendars are gonna rock! Heres a little sneak peek.

Now using Futura Round—this years hot new typeface and a very satisfying full width grid this years calendar bodes to be the best one yet grab yours at a ponydance show near you. (We are only showing in Belfast ????)

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T Shirts

pony, ride, trot. The three best words in the English language apart from spatular and some others. I’m always surprised at the t-shirts people go for, everyone seems to have their own favourite. When designing them you think to yourself, you’d have to have a certain amount of confidence to walk around with a t-shirt with “ride” with a big pink “i“, but you’ll see men, women, old and young pick them up and good on them—you’re all rides!

We are in the process of selecting from a bunch of designs and I’m excited by this bunch. Problem with designing t-shirts is you want one of each design, this year we have a ton of options so it would cost a fortune to have one of each. Saying that last year I missed out on them all cos they sold out ???? so I have first dibs.

…and we might have a few other surprises