Brave New World

I'm still catching up with putting work on here that I've done in the past couple of months. I started this blog as it's a lot less faffy than updating the Flash portfolio on my website but sometimes I'm too busy even to do this. And don't even ask me when I last went surfing. I might cry.

Any how, enough of tears and back to joy, as in November the lovely Wil at CIO Connect asked me to design the brochure again for their annual conference. He'd picked out an iStock image and a typeface and asked me to come up with a design based around them, and here's what happened...

CIO Connect Summer 2009 edition

Here's the latest issue of CIO Connect, on the theme of sustainability. The cover feature was shot in quite an urban setting but I wanted to convey the 'green' theme, so I created lots of little motifs of flowers and insects to run throughout the spread. They seemed too clean, and a little prissy, so I printed them out, rubbed away areas with a putty rubber before the ink-jet ink had fully dried, scrunched them up, ironed them out and then scanned the now rather wrecked scraps of paper back in. It's what gives a rather dirty, worn effect to the illustrations. I did the same with the headlines, and also the large arrow graphics on the leadership spread. I guess it's difficult to see using these low-resolution pics but I hope you get the idea.

Photoshop is great, but sometimes real-life does filters better.

CIO Connect Magazine

I've been designing the magazine for top IT people for five years now. In theory this might mean that I'm getting pretty bored and tired with the mag but nope, not at all. This is the second issue with new editor Mark Samuels and he's come up with loads of new ideas which is kind of inspiring, so I've been pushing to make every issue better than the last. Obviously you always have to bear in mind the readership - who they are, what they're expecting. A friend said to me once that I know genre and can work with it - my aim is to give the client exactly what they want and not be all egotistical and stamp my style, whatever that might be, on the publication. All your work ends up looking the same that way. Anyway, here are a few spreads; hope you like them.