Adventures in the Bush

The superlative Debi Withers asked me to illustrate the cover for her forthcoming book. She wrote her doctoral thesis about the music of Kate Bush, exploring and deconstructing the avant-garde artist's work in fascinating detail.

Doctoral theses, with the best will in the world, are not often the most readable of texts. With this in mind, Withers has re-written her opus with the music-loving general public in mind. The book is designed as a creative theoretical narrative that tells a story. She says:

"I want Bush’s music to come alive in an experimental fashion but retain a focus on how it exists at the interrelation of popular culture, theory, art, the avant-garde, history and philosophy. I also want to demonstrate how sexuality, gender, power, race, class and spirituality shape her work. My desire is to move away from conventional uses of theory that are often found within academic writing. I want an adventure."

I've read the first three chapters of the book and it's awesome - I'm proud to be associated with it and can't wait to see a hard copy.

Withers asked only that I took inspiration from her text for the cover. It became clear that Bush of the book is a flowing, twisting, natural creature, unboundaried, powerful, elegant. I visualised the words of the cover - strong, clean, clear - and saw ivy creeping out, around, everywhere; filling the spaces between things and connecting everything to everything else. I drew bugs and birds, flowers, mammals, strange symbols that came to mind. It was black on white at first draft; I showed it to Withers and she asked that I invert it and add some red and green. I did this and was amazed at the result - often a small suggestion from someone else - something you would never have thought of - can completely transform your work.

The book is due to be published in March 2010, and you will be able to buy your copy here.

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...

Autumn Pulse

Pulse is the name of my favourite shop in Cardiff - go in there and buy organic raw chocolate truffles and Fentiman's ginger beer and practise your Welsh on them - and also of a (IMHO) toecurlingly-dire gay nightclub - just... well, I warned you.

It's also the name of a fledgling publication put out by the IISP. Steve Newton of Galatea got in touch last year and asked me if I'd be interested in working with him on a potential project, and having worked with him as designer/illustrator on a magazine that he edited, I was happy to. It's midway between a newsletter and a magazine, and information-heavy, so the design has to be clean and clear and simple. I use black and white for type, a strong grid system and fewer larger images, all of which help with clarity.

The people at IISP like the cover to reflect their corporate ID in some way rather than the more traditional photograph and coverlines, so for this second issue I decided that recreating the arrow in their logo using autumn leaves might work. I collected handfuls of colourful leaves, conkers and pinecones in Bute Park and, on a bright afternoon, photographed them all on a white background in my garden. I arranged these bits and bobs into position and worked a rough, textured background upon which to set them. It worked rather well, and the IISP were happy.



Sometimes, being a designer is a bit Blue Peterish. Those times are good.

Honeyspring

Kerstin Schmidt approached me in May after another client of mine recommended me to her. She wanted a logo and website for her healing practice, based in the elegant Redland area of Bristol.

Working with Kerstin was an incredible experience, and not like anything I have ever done before. We worked using intuition: I presented ideas to her that felt right, rather than what I thought she wanted to see. She would journey (a kind of meditation) and come back with information for me, and we bounced back and forth like this, not rushing, taking time, until she felt the work was complete. I started with the logo - parts of which are doodle, parts are splashes of water from a knocked-over glass, parts are a rock from my garden - and when this was done, I travelled to Bristol and took many photographs around her apartment and her healing room and then, using other photographs I'd taken from walks around Cardiff, put together a very simple, clean site, with which she was delighted.

She says, "Just to say how much I have appreciated your design work on my website. It was brilliant throughout.  I especially want to honour your creativity, your commitment, your willingness to keep working and absolutely go the distance no matter what.  I’ll be very happy to recommend you to my colleagues wholeheartedly. You are so meant to do work like this."

...which, of course, I'm chuffed to bits with.

Yuletide ponderings

and breeeeeeeathe

It has been two months since my last confession. The world withdraws and retreats from the grey and the cold and the sun skims the southern horizon, seemingly setting as soon as it has risen. The birds chirp at each other, gorging on the seeds and suet balls, but they seem very far away. I sit, ensconced in blankets and cat hair, green tea in hand, and reflect on the year. Flipping back through my diary is a shocking reminder of how hard I've worked - order from chaos; ideas realised, plans made concrete, doodles to sketches to renderings to printed products on shelves and doormats.

So, without further ado, I post a series of blogs describing the work that I was too busy to upload earlier. Hope you like them and all that.

CIO Connect Autumn 2009 magazine

I'm very busy right now so I'll just leave these here - some pages from the latest issue of CIO Connect, the magazine for top IT people. I'm also currently working on a conference brochure for them and will soon begin creating an illustration for the cover of their annual member survey, as well as the interior layout. I've worked with CIO Connect right from the start of my freelance career and really appreciate how they've allowed me to develop my style over the years. Lovely people!

Grrr

Even as I type this, I'm umming and ahhing as to whether this is wise. Surely a blog that's linked to my work website should be all sweetness and light – here! look at the lovely work I've done! how wonderful my clients are! how great this job is! But as any fool know, it ain't all like that.

Graphic design is regarded as one of those 'cool' jobs. I don't know if it is, but I do know that the skills required are a balanced marriage of creativity and geekdom. Drawing pretty pictures is all very well but an ability to grasp software quickly and fix the occasional hardware breakdown, a thorough knowledge of art and design history, an intuitive understanding of how to play to various audience demographics and a practical grounding in print processes and the limits of what is possible are all vital, too. When you're freelance, you can add reasonable people skills, discipline and opportunism to that list too.

It's also one of those industries where, on the most part, people charge for their time. Macs and software must be purchased, electricity bills paid, but in comparison to other industries, overheads are fairly low - especially for those of us who work from home.

Because of this, some potential clients seem to think that you should 'do them a favour' and slash your prices. I wonder if a builder gave them a quote for a wall that was £1500, would they turn around and say, I'm sure you could do it for £300 if you really thought about it. They don't consider the time spent amassing skills, developing styles, the time spent sitting and thinking and problem solving, and they certainly don't seem to understand that I have a mortgage to pay. It's akin to moaning about the rates that lawyers charge for sending a letter, without taking into account the years of training, abilities and expenses incurred. Lawyers, like graphic designers, solve specialised problems, and although my rates are nowhere near that of a lawyer (and my abilities at warping the truth are, to be frank, abysmal), the principles are the same.

What's prompted these thoughts is a phone-call from a one-off client. I created a cheap flyer for him in January on the understanding (but not the promise with contract – a lesson I have learned) that there would be more work in the shape of a website and a brochure. I had quoted him a page rate for a brochure and agreed to charge the same for this flyer, even though it would take me longer.

After creating a beautiful flyer for very little money, he then took an aeon to pay me, and sent me no file copies, which were part of the deal. The brochure and website work never materialised – I didn't hear from him after receiving that cheque, until I received repeated phone calls from him last week asking for the artwork again as he'd lost the disc I sent him. I told him I hadn't archived it (I didn't bother, having no intention of working with him again) and that the recreation of the flyer would cost a lot more this time. He couldn't quite believe it when I said 'no' to offering him the same deal I'd offered him before.

It's a common theme. I have some wonderful clients who have knowledge of marketing and the media and the skills required to do my job, and they know that I quote honestly, I stick to those prices, and on occasion when they ask me if it's possible to reduce a price in some way I'll do my best to do that.  I assume – from the fact that they come back again and again – that they consider me good value. In my six years as a freelancer I've only lost two clients, and those were large businesses who grew big enough to employ their own designers in-house. I'm really lucky to have clients I love working with – there is no-one to whom I answer the phone with a heavy heart. But it's those who want the one-off jobs – "I've knocked up this logo in Word – can you make it look nice? I can pay you £25!" – often business start-ups, people with little knowledge of how vital the visual impact of your business is – who seem to think that this is minimum-wage work, and that they are doing you a favour when they ask for the moon on a stick for a fiver. You know that when you email over the quote you won't hear from them again, that you're wasting your time and also, inevitably, dashing their hopes of having a quality brand created for the cost of a KFC family bucket. I'm not heartless: I know what it is to start out on your own without a penny to spare, and often I genuinely want to help. But commonly, when I do hear back from them, their attitude is that I am ripping them off, taking advantage and generally being a scumbag. Such is life, I suppose – you have to shrug and carry on regardless – but it doesn't make a person feel particularly 'cool'.

Savonnerie logo

Hand-on-heart this was the most difficult and involved piece of work I have ever done and hence the one I love the best. The lovely people at Savonnerie London asked me to help with their rebranding a while back and while we're still working on that the logo is signed off. Logos are generally clean and simple so what on earth possessed me to go the other way?

Savonnerie London is a luxury soap company with a shabby-chic French rococo feel. Its products are hand-made from 100% natural ingredients and attention to detail is superb. I thought the logo should reflect this. This logo works because the area around the text is clean, so even when the logo is used very small, the text is still legible and the overall feel of the detail is still present. The details reflect the natural products - there are deer, ladybirds, bees, shells and a butterfly interspersed with ivy and oak leaves.

The style of the logo is that of an engraving, so the shadows are made of cross-hatched lines. The logo had to work from very small to very big, which meant creating it in Adobe Illustrator. I started off presenting the idea as a real rough, by copying and pasting bits of rococo art together to give the clients an idea of where I was headed. Looking back at this I can't quite believe they had such faith in me to let me carry on with my fanciful ideas, but I'm glad they did.

After this, I began the pencil sketching. This took maybe three or four goes of drawing and rubbing out bits; here is an early drawing:

Once the pencil sketch was approved I commence the inking - the old fashioned way, with a dip-pen and indian ink:

... and then finally I scanned this in, and traced it, every single cross-hatched line of it, in Illustrator. It was worth every late night sat at my desk - I get a warm glow every time I look at it. It's a wonderful thing when you get pretty much a free-rein from a client to create something really special. It's what the job's all about, I guess.

Photos

Here are some photos that I took around Cardiff over the weekend, mostly in Bute Park.

Dwy'n dechrau dysgu Cymraeg eto!

Apologies for any mistakes in the above. I haven't learned Welsh since GCSE and 10 years of living in England mean I can barely say bore da. So what I'm trying to say is that I'm starting to learn Welsh again! I signed up for Cardiff University's Wlpan course, which is two hours two evenings a week, and by the end of the year you're fluent (and I have friends who've done this course, English friends to boot with no prior knowledge of the language, who are now fluent, so this is a sort of cast-iron guarantee).

Although I'd be just fine designing and laying out copy in the language at the moment (hey, I've laid out perfectly well in German, French and Russian and no polyglot am I, I can assure you), I'm looking forward to being able to offer clients a full Welsh-language service. And also nosing in on people's conversations on the train, obviously...

NHS posters

Viva Media asked me to design a poster template for their client, Caerphilly Local Health Board. They wanted six different A1 posters, differentiated by colour, celebrating their recent achievements for an event involving the Welsh Assembly that's scheduled for 9th September. They supplied copy and images and I did the rest. The above is my favourite of the six.

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.

I used to sell cat paintings on ebay

Okay, so I'm aware that if you have a blog you need to keep it updated with regular news. Trouble is that at the moment I'm in the middle of a few projects and won't have anything to report for a while, so I thought I'd upload a few of the paintings I used to do when I was starting out as a freelancer. Money was tight so I created a few stylised cat designs and painted variations on themes. I'd put them up for auction on ebay, usually a few at a time. They were pretty popular, selling all over the world - I had a fan in Japan who bought ten - and one painting went for around £300 I think.

I'd pretty much forgotten about them until earlier when I was searching through some old files and there they were. I guess I don't have much to say about them other than I love their simplicity and how they have some essence of cat about them.

Hugging trees

I love trees. I have one in my back garden: she grows apples and her name is Freya. And from now on I'll be loving lots of trees at once (in an entirely polyamorous, consensual way) because I'm going to give 5% of my profits to The Woodland Trust. My prices will stay exactly the same. It's a small way of giving back - although my opinion on carbon offset schemes is that they offset guilt rather than greenhouse gases, preserving our woodlands is vital, and I'm delighted to be a (tiny) part of this process. I'll also be looking to spend one day a month doing volunteer work for local environmental projects once the pollen count has dipped below defcon 1... watch this space!

Giant ants the size of foals

Okay, so I'm not going to say too much about this one - just that I'm massively happy with it and the pic doesn't do it justice. Yes, those are giant ants, on an island, and the further up the island you go the more the ants become part of everything else. It's an illustration for a forthcoming book and there will be 32 more.

I've never painted an illustration before - it's a real luxury and I'm loving it. I've also been commissioned to create a painting for a massage-therapist friend - one he can put in his therapy room. I love my work!

Savonnerie

Last week the luxury toiletries company Savonnerie commissioned me to help them rebrand their company. I'll be looking at every aspect of their marketing, from logos to packaging to illustrations to website to advertising.

It's a fantastic job and I'm very excited about it. Projects like this are rare gems - the owners want a highly creative, original, decadent style, they want to apply that style across a wide range of materials, and they have strong ethical principles that are in step with my own. I've turned down work in the past because I didn't agree with business practices, so it's great to be working on something that I can get really passionate about.

Plus (and for the record, I'm not the sort of person that normally gets excited about toiletries) - their products are AWESOME.

Gone surfing

One of the many good things about being freelance is the hours. Sometimes I'll have a week with very little on; sometimes I'll be working all hours. It's not constant, which is great, as those three little words 'nine' 'to' and 'five' fill me with a visceral dread only equalled by the prospect of being made to watch back-to-back soap operas at my parents' house. I have more time to do more of the things I like, and when I'm doing the things I like I tend to be thinking about stuff I'm working on and how I can make it better.

So in a sense, when people find out I work from home and ask me how I manage to switch off at the end of the day, the answer is that I never really do. This isn't a bad thing - if you love what you do, you don't view it as a 'job' but as something that challenges, pushes, inspires you - it's part of who you are. I went to see David Carson talk in London last year and he said that the perfect occupation is something you would choose to do even if you didn't need the money. I'm not saying that I want to spend even more of my time sat in front of my Mac, but the thing is, my best ideas are the ones that come to me when I'm not sat in front of my Mac.

The things I like to do to get ideas include gardening, painting, doodling, yoga and, most of all, surfing. The thing I don't like about doing the things I like is that when I get caught out doing them by clients, I feel a bit guilty. Which is stupid, because if I'm doing these things while I'm supposed to be sat in front of my Mac doing work for them, chances are I'm actually processing the problems and challenges raised by their brief, and coming up with creative ways around them.

I guess the guilt stems from when I worked in a design agency in Cambridge. We had this enormous fish tank, and when I was stuck for ideas I would sit in front of it and watch the clown loaches snuffle the gravel around or the plecostomus moodily swish the smaller fish out of his way. My boss (who was generally a Nice Person) would get a bit irritated by this. He seemed to think that I was skiving on his time. If we had a lot of work on and I went for a long walk and lay under an oak tree in my lunch hour instead dropping sandwich crumbs on my keyboard and cursing at Quark (for lo and behold children, back in those days of yore we did indeed use Quark), upon my return I'd get this Look, a Look that accused me of Not Taking The Work Seriously. In fact, I just needed to shift into a different gear - the gear that lets the ideas in.

It's a difficult process to put into words but it goes a little like this. You stop thinking with your head. Your focus shifts down, you breathe slowly and deeply: you think with your heart. Your brain sinks into the back of your head and your vision becomes peripheral: you do not focus on one thing but instead you see all. You forget yourself in the grander scheme of things: the goldfinch picks seeds from the bird-feeder hanging from the apple tree or the sunlight dances on the glassy sea as you paddle for a wave or the random melding of colours on the paint palette become something more... 

You can't think up ideas. They just come.

Captain America!

In the midst of winter I received a call from a potential client who had a new product that he wanted a complete look for. This thing was some sort of craft invention that was aimed at children and schools but that adults could enjoy, too. He'd had interest from big toy sellers including Hamleys and John Lewis, so the product needed to look absolutely stunning. I was to create a cartoon character - a superhero - and to design all the packaging in the style of a classic comic book, create a comic strip and a website.

An amazing brief, and as with all things that seem too good to be true, it was. Alarm bells sounded when the client kept adding more work to the brief without wanting to address the financial implications, and he became very sheepish when I sent him a quote with a full breakdown of costs even though I'd explained them to him from the start. So I held back on the project until I had full confirmation from him, and only did a few sketches. After a meeting with his bank, he realised he didn't have the money. The job was cancelled only a week after it started.

It is irksome; although some people appreciate how much care and consideration you put into each job, others seem to think you can churn out work like some sort of McProduction Line.

Hey ho: every cloud has a silver lining, etc. I got to spend a few days curled up beside my log fire learning how to draw superheroes while the song of the silent snow played softly outside. It's something they don't teach you in art college - you do a lot of life drawing and anatomy, so you know the lie of the human muscoloskelature, but superheroes are something else entirely. They're massively exaggerated, with dramatic perspective and little drawing tricks that emphasise movement and distance, and subtle crosshatching blending the blackest indian ink with the white of the page. Lucky for me, one of my best friends is a comic book geek and lent me a great how-to book by John Buscema of Marvel comics, so I set to work learning from one of the greatest artists of the genre.

Flipping through my sketchbook earlier, I saw the above inking. When the job was cancelled I was annoyed at having wasted my time, but looking back I appreciate having had the opportunity to diversify my skills. Such is life, I guess.

Charitylog logo

A couple of months ago I was approached by a client with whom I've worked occasionally, pretty much since I started freelancing almost six years ago. I'd done a couple of logos for him and this time he wanted me to look at the logo of one of his clients, Charitylog.

It's a company that has designed software for charities working in the public sector. It provides a log where employees and volunteers can record dealings with clients - for example elderly and disabled people and their carers - so that everything is organised and clear, in one place and most of all, secure.

What's important (to me) is to work out not just what the client wants but what their customers need. So you've got this brand-new cutting-edge software and that's all fine and dandy, but hey, computers and software can be frightening to your perhaps technophobic customers - software can be full of holes, computers can crash and lose data - and if you're a charity paid by the local council to look after vulnerable people you certainly don't want those people's personal details hacked or leaked or lost or whatever. The thing to emphasise, then, is that this particular software is clean, clear and secure. So that's what I did.

I worked on logos that were strong, reassuring, simple and gave the feeling of security. I used motifs like keys, cogs and locks. I used a lot of blue and green - calming colours - and everyday typefaces. This one, the final approved logo, uses Helvetica Black - very common, which is useful because it's recognisable and not new and scary. By putting the type in a black box the logo is contained and feels secure. The round corners soften it a little and the drop shadow (used with caution - these things can look terrible) lifts it. And then there's the little touch of colour with the padlock 'a'.

That's pretty much the thing about being a graphic designer. You can be the most creative person on the planet and produce the most astoundingly beautiful, edgy work, but if it doesn't work for the client and their customers, you're dead in the water.

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.