Rawwrrrr!

I've just been commissioned by Grace Todd of the National Museum of Wales to create illustrations for a children's workshop she and her colleagues present for schools on the subject of dinosaurs. How exciting is that?

DINOSAURS!

Sorry, just had to say it again.

I am very excited about this! (does it show?) I'll have the illustrations done by the end of the month, so watch this space and I'll put them up. Or alternatively just pretend to be a small child and smuggle yourself into the workshop.

I hadn't been around the museum for a few years and it's well worth a visit. I had a quick look around the natural history bit with Grace & marveled at the size of the albatross (I mean, I knew they were big, but srsly, they're HUGE), the gazelle (tiny, like an über-femme goat) the bizarre moths and butterflies and the incredible crystal formations. They've got a good dinosaur bit too with lots of skeletons so I'm going to go in there with a camera and take some pics of the sets for a backdrop to the story I'm illustrating.

Awesome work - thanks Grace!

CIO Connect Winter 2009 magazine

And a happy new decade to you, and all that malarky.

Just before 2009 curled up in its hibernaculum and left us all ensconced in snow, CIO Connect magazine went to press. It's a job I've had pretty much since I edged out on my own as a nervous yet optimistic newbie freelancer, and it's helped my develop my style as much as I've developed the magazine.

One thing that struck me as I saved these pages for the blog is how vital good photography is for a professional-looking magazine. The design can be as fancy-pants as you like but if your images are small, fuzzy, low-res and dark you may as well be the village newsletter. I've met with a few people considering setting up magazines and it seems to be something that, on the whole, they don't regard as important, and resent spending money on.

This is a mistake, and a fundamental one. I may be shooting myself in the foot here, but my opinion is that for the most part, bad photography will let your publication down worse than bad design. Sure, someone with no concept of design will struggle to maximise the impact of good photography, and a good designer will take the same photography and make it sing from the rooftops, but it's very difficult to do anything at all with bad photography.

This, heavens be praised, is something that the people at CIO Connect appreciate, and always have done. They tend to use Martin Burton, who is just bloody ace, and a consummate professional to boot. His skill makes it easier for me to have fun with the layout and means the magazine is a whole lot more pleasurable to work on.

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.