Stagecoach, Hold Your Horse Is, Crooked Mountain, Crooked sea.

Another gig flyer/poster for The 405
A bit of a re-work of some ideas from around a year ago. They're going to use the second one, in the end. (The music has a summery/hazy/beachy kind of feel to it... if it's possible for music to sound like a beach. You know what I mean.)


Also, slightly off topic, but rumours are flying that the BBC is going to axe their excellent radio station, 6Music. I will be properly devastated if this happens, I listen to it most of the time when I'm at home, and there's just no replacement for it, either within the BBC, or in the scary world of commercial radio. I implore you to give it a listen, (if you don't already know it), and if you enjoy it as much as I do, please contact the BBC and tell them to keep 6Music going. Good. Thanks.

Two Books

I think I've finished.
I also think my tutors are going to say that this is a case of style over content, and I suspect they're right. But everyone loves a bit of style, surely? Check out that spine stitching. I am well pleased with that.

You can read my previous post about this project here...
So, these are my newspaper supplements. I'd inititally only intended to make one, but my tutor Martin wanted me to use photographs. I really didn't want to, but I did... and I didn't like it. So in the end, I made another one, the way I want it to be.

Apologies for the quality of the photographs, my SLR ran out of batteries, and I had to use my small camera... for some reason, of late, all the pictures have been coming out really grainy. The pictures don't really do this justice, but I'm going to shower you with them anyway.

Here is the first one, which has photography in it:






And here is the second one, which only incorporates my patterns and illustrations. (Yes, that is a very similar illustration to my Bastions flyer from a couple of weeks back. I needed a cover illustration urgently, and this was ideal, I have edited it and changed it in a few areas though.)

The UK Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef

I made a decision when I started this blog that it was going to be a blog purely of my own work, rather than a collection of things I like.
I'm making an exception for this post. Mainly because I've been unable to find any online pictures that do this justice (not that my own do much better) and mainly because it blew my mind and made me happy in all sorts of ways when I stumbled across it. The beauty of the thing, the sense of community in making it, the ecological/environmental message, the colour and vividness, the sheer oddness of the whole concept.

Yes. It's a crocheted coral reef. I was in Colchester a couple of weeks ago, and couldn't not go into this gallery when I saw it through the window.
The reef was created by hundreds of individuals, and is part of a worldwide project 'which fuses science and mathematics with art and handicrafts'

Enjoy.

Ok, so it turns out Narwhals are real.

I mean, how was I supposed to know?
The whole furore has called for something of an update to the old 'M is for mountain' project (Which, by the way, I've still been quietly powering away on.)


Mmmm, narwhals.

Just in case you thought I'd abandoned traditional pen and paper forever...

I haven't. Flyer for Bastions and Battle for Paris. If you're about Liverpool, you should go, although to be honest I'm not sure I could stay up that late... 2am to 6am? That's well into my sleep time! (Rock n' roll)

Here's the original illustration, produced over half an hour during our lecture this morning...

Africa continued...

More imagery for the project, illustrations of women wearing some of the fabrics I designed.
The illustrations are based on photographs from this video

Africa

Been quiet for a while, mainly because I've been pondering on our new project... 'Research current issues in Africa. Pick the information that is of most importance to you. Create an educational piece of design.'

Well, I wasn't really sure where to begin, as I know very little about Africa, besides the obvious - famine, apartheid... and I wanted to shy away from the obvious. So I decided to start investigating the issues faced by women in Africa, and over the course of my research, I found this incredibly moving, distressing article, about the vast numbers of women who suffer rape in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
I've decided that I want to show this article to a wider audience. Much pondering on how to do this, but after a discussion with my tutor, I've decided to go for a beautifully done newspaper supplement. People are sick of reading mail outs/ads with pictures of sad Africans and pleas for money. It needs to be sophisticated, elegant, readable and striking. This is about letting the world know what's occurring, and in some small way, trying to increase the pressure on the government of the DRC.

One visual thing that struck my over the course of my research was the striking clothes the women wear. The style of fabrics in Africa is so distinctive, so vibrant, and these women who have suffered so much still wear these amazingly vivid clothes, which hide goodness knows what scars.
I've done a lot of research into African fabric designs, and started to produce some of my own, which - at first glance may appear to be normal patterns, but on second glance, you see hidden within them some of the things that the women wearing them have suffered... bullets, scars, guns...
I'm going to incorporate these designs as full pages in my final newspaper supplement, to run alongside the article. (Which will be beautifully done, typographically... I hope...)

So here are the ones I've done so far. They are based on traditional and modern African fabric designs which are worn by African women today.





I've decided that photography in the article is going to be limited. Partly for copyright reasons, (I don't have permission to use these images, and hope that the photographer doesn't mind me showing them here) and partly because, as I said earlier, we have been numbed to those kind of pictures by years and years of Oxfam mail-outs/TV ads/news pieces.
But having seen film of these women speaking about what they have experienced, these images seem incredibly powerful to me, and I may use one or two of them in my final piece.




You can see the video these images were taken from here

This is an unusually serious project for me... I don't normally like dealing with real 'issues'. I just hope I can do it some kind of justice.

Deepest Darkest Hove

Come for a walk with me.

one


two
three (nice typeface)

four
five
six
seven
eight

nine

Poster power!

So, here are the final posters which I'm going to show to my tutors tomorrow. I very much hope they like them, and I even more hope that they will be actually chosen for the degree show! When displayed side by side, they line up perfectly to form one long strip of colour. They're all slightly different to break it up a bit.

I am CROSS

Ok. You may or may not remember, a while back, I designed a logo for the upcoming Brighton student Radio Station, 'Burst Radio'. Here was my post about it.
To remind you, here was the logo I designed for them.

It went quiet, for over a year.
Then today, I opened the student newspaper 'The Pebble'... imagine my horror, when I turned to page 14, to find a feature all about 'Burst Radio', featuring THIS MONSTROSITY:


I don't really know what to do. I mean, I gave it to them, no conditions attached, and so be it. My name isn't attached, so I can't complain that's it's affecting my design reputation.
And is it even that bad? I think it's hideous (as you may be able to tell....) But maybe that's just me being a design snob. I don't know, is it some kind of copyright infringement, or is it just poor etiquette on their part? Am I overreacting? Questions questions questions.

The logo which I designed isn't the best logo ever designed. But what on earth made them think that the best way of improving it would be to add stars, two extra borders and some 1970's throwback typeface?! It looks like a cross between a laundry powder packet and something designed by a 7 year old on word art!

I designed the logo for them, because I think student radio is a really good thing, and I wanted to contribute in some way towards creating a sophisticated modern identity for them. I'm disappointed and frustrated at what they've turned that into.

Do I write a strongly worded e-mail? I've drafted one, which is as polite as can be, offers to design them a new logo (which I will happily do), but quite clearly puts across my disgust.
I shall see how I feel tomorrow.

EDIT
It seems they are using the logo I designed for them on their twitter feed
But they haven't even bothered to separate the two colourways I originally sent them! I despair, I really do. They managed to find someone with the photoshop SKILLZ to create that Pebble version, yet not someone capable of cutting a simple JPEG in half. Oh dear.

Maybe I'm getting carried away...

But I REALLY like this.

My only worries are that

a) It's a bit corporate, and/or boring

b) The tutors will say my type is dull. For the record, I think it works, and that anything bigger/more exciting would distract from the central illustration.

c) The meaning (doors) isn't obvious enough.

AND, they tile nicely.

I still want to do more work with interesting tiling, time allowing. This is gorgeous. I have it as my wallpaper.