Abecedarian

Adj. Elementary, or arranged in alphabetical order.

Sale into 2013

The local shopping centre, previously a client where I work, wanted some artwork to go onto the screens inside their malls for the new year sales. I took the opportunity to do some hand-drawn lettering for it and then re-draw it in Illustrator. It was a small project but I'd have loved some more time to refine the drawing. The artwork was used on their external screen too – probably the biggest display of anything I've ever done!

Car dealership adverts

I was asked to refresh the newspaper advertising of a client at work who sells new and used cars.

The original adverts stuck to one or two low-impact colours and used graphic elements that were better suited to the web. So I opted for bright colours where appropriate, and added some strong flat graphics as an extension of the branding.

The artwork below shows the flat 'used car' advert, and the 'new car' ads in print. I was happy to see that the colours came out nice and bold first-time.

Web banners for kitchens

Some web banners I've done in recent months for a work client. It's always a big help when you have access to a bank of great images to work with.

Christmas campaign

I came up with the concept behind this Christmas campaign for our local shopping centre after they'd briefed us to relate it back to their existing Christmas tv advert – which was based around the word 'if' (i.e. 'if you could have it all in one place' and 'if you could give everybody everything' etc).

It was great to have worked on a fully-fledged campaign that allowed us to arrange for a photographer to help us get the ideal shots. What we achieved was a warm traditional idea of Christmas, and definitely ensured that shoppers would know where to go during the festive season.

Weekend lettering

Some hand-drawn stuff inspired by Louise Fili – really love her work and it was cool to find out how much she knows about Florence and Italy in general. I really like the colours I've used below – I took them from a poster I saw recently. Might have to get the image from my work computer to show you the poster I mean.

Futtock

Mafia couple

I was inspired by a video I saw a couple of weeks ago about a character illustrator – it's often the case that, despite what we might assume, these top notch concept artists and illustrators use the most basic methods or technology. The video showed how the guy when from paper to pixel with his drawings and it looked so simple.

I meant to just spend 30 mins or so on this, like the guy in the video I watched, but I still had Bert Monroy in my head . . . so I applied minute detail to everything (which you can't see in the image). For instance, if you zoom right into the guy's trousers you'll see a stitching texture! Alas . . . . this ain't no Google Art Project, so no mega zoom will be possible.

Student Fair project

Recently at work, I've produced a flyer and a 'pull-up' display panel for our company stand – which will be/has been set up at three different student fairs that are currently taking place. Unfortunately one of the fairs was arranged very poorly by an external agency and we therefore had very little luck getting students' interest.

Designing something as large as the pull-up (about 7ft tall) was a new experience for me and, although I tried a photographic version of it, I thought it  best to stick to a vector-based design. Also, I think it gives the flyer a little more effect if it includes something that the pull-up does not (the photography).

I was quite pleased with the icon I developed out of the heart and the question mark. After a bit of thinking, we decided the resounding point of the design should be to propose 'care' to students ('are you the caring type?'). So the icon sums that up with the context its given by the text.

You'll also notice, looking at the two sides of the flyer, that I had to doctor the photograph slightly to allow the text to sit where it needed to - in front of the smiley girl's face. So, as sad as I was to have to paint her out, she had to go. This is something I've learned just from looking at other design in the environment – there are ways of controlling images so that they don't conflict with your text, like semi-transparent panels, solid colours, cropping etc. In other words, I found the girl's face was obscuring my text and that, ideally, the background for the text should be a solid colour. That area of the photograph was already dark so I decided I could extend the black and get round the problem that way.

Map of Italy

I'm thinking of drawing a map of the UK for the office at work – people in my department could do with one on the wall.

I thought I'd see how difficult or time-consuming it might be by doing a simple one of Italy (for myself). It's quite a cool little design task because you can do it a number of ways (dots/squares/lines/typography(??)) and you learn the geography almost by accident. Vatican City looks like a little scar on the face of Lazio but I felt it should probably be included!

It's a little annoying having so little time to write my blog these days (I usually do some work first, and then write about it). Still, I might be able to upload the work I do for my employer at some point (I'm currently finishing an advert for them).

Lettering

I’ve been hand-drawing some type recently – and looking closer at my favourite typefaces, Univers and Futura – and I remembered I’ve yet to get comfortable drawing the ‘s’. So I decided not to leave my desk until I managed to get something decent drawn.

Here’s the result below. I compared it with the Futura and Univers characters afterwards and thought it struck quite a nice contrast. My letter is a little bottom heavy because of the grid I used – I did put form before function tbh (I used golden proportions between the lower and upper circular parts) It may be worth continuing but for now I’m happy I’ve sussed the ‘s’ to some extent.

I found it useful in Illustrator to zoom right out from the letter to make sure it was working at a small scale – as you would with a logo, for instance. Playing around with the stroke size also helps – making it really thin/fat will uncover any errors in the curves.

Kaleidotype

I’ve been looking through my portfolio recently and noticed a few things I could be exploring in more detail: the process used to make the images below is one of them. Almost a year or so ago, I wondered whether type could be used in place of those little colourful shapes you get in kaleidoscopes. I did a bit of experimenting and found it to be relatively simple – as far as how the patterns are made. Alternatively, the process can just be used to make cool little typographic images. The images below are just a few attempts at finding out how far it can go, hence their slightly shabby look. So many variables! Colour, typeface, type-size, type colours…. Plenty to try with it but I think, with these, the more subtle/simple the design, the better.

Music posters

I just wanted to try some info-graphics and put to use some things I know in Illustrator (didn’t find much use for Illustrator at uni) so I grabbed the names and durations of some of my favourite music to represent it visually.

Basically each individual shape represents a track — in the Muse posters, for instance, the length of each line relates to every other and corresponds to the track length. The full circle, then, represents the longest track. The pink was introduced to show a difference between the last three tracks and the rest of the album because they’re actually one track (in 3 parts). On retrospect maybe a change of colour isn’t the most logical way to show this.

Although it looks quite nice, it didn’t quite make sense to allow the longest track to appear differently to the others so the Litolff posters attempt to show the music as a full circle (like the reading of a CD). This way all of the music is shown to be of equal significance. The classical works are separated according to tempo differences which is what the deepening greens try to imply. Decent start — should be more to come.

Wine label

The following images show parts of a 52-step design process that I went through to come up with a wine label using ONLY type and as few different typefaces/sizes/weights/colours as possible. I learned that only one form of typographic change can be enough — be it size, weight, colour etc to make a label’s information clear. At certain stages I drew new guides for text layouts which explains the empty-looking boxes. Towards the end I got attached to Univers as a typeface because it makes a big contrast with the usual typefaces found on labels — classical/decorative script faces.

This work is my own and is not designed by/for Casillero del Diablo. I have permission for their label information to be reproduced in my work here.

Type design: A-N

Getting there. The ‘m’ is a little too extended though; this is especially obvious when two ‘m’s are used side-by-side.

Vector World Map

It might come in handy some day! I’ve been meaning to do one since my mate did the same thing for his own work in Bath. It’s vector-based so it can be changed in a number of ways e.g. the shapes/colours/sizes — see bottom image for example of alternative.