Card games

Sometimes we don't get a lot of time to explain to people how they should approach their brand. Our little leave behind pack of cards is designed keep people thinking about their brand long after we've left them.

Birthday card

A good friend of mine recently found himself in need of business cards and an identity. As a birthday surprise I designed him a logo and card and had them printed and delivered to him. It's a pretty good feeling when you can positively use your profession to impact those closest to you.

Keeping British Heritage alive

A few years ago we had the opportunity to get involved with branding one of the UK's greatest art heritage sites - the Stanley Spencer gallery. It was with a real sense of pride that we helped establish the gallery in the heart of Cookham; the home town and inspiration of Spencer.

With record prices for Stanley Spencer and L S Lowry claiming the headlines of last weeks 20th-century British Art auctions, having a solid home for Spencer's work is more important than it's ever been.

Three part iPad series

When creating personal work I often struggle with the inertia needed to create images in a series. Singular pictures represent far less of a commitment and the energy needed to finish them is often generated entirely from the excitement of the concept. For me, the end of one drawing usually represents a dissolving of that excitement and the motivation to continue with an idea has to be built elsewhere. With the above sketches the excitement to persist with a theme came from the tools I was using to create. Every drawing I do on the iPad still feels like a learning experience and for me it represents the perfect time to capitalize on creating that most elusive of beasts, the three part series.


NB. Number one of the series can be seen further down the blog

Finger painting

I've dabbled with a few different sketching/painting apps for the iPad but few have captured my attention long enough to create something of note. For anyone familiar with digital desktop sketching, iPad drawing can often be a frustrating experience. A stubby digit is much less precise than a mouse pointer and a lack of keyboard really starts to show when short cut commands have to be selected from a menu (or worse by using complicated finger gestures).
For me Adobe Ideas gets it right. It doesn't try to recreate a desktop drawing experience but rather limits the controls at your disposal in favour of a streamlined interface. You can't cut/paste, create perfect shapes, fill, scale or even draw straight lines. What you get in the absence of all that is a piece of software that genuinely feels intuitive to use with one finger. Above is my first crack at finger painting but already I feel pretty hooked by it.

Storytelling

 

In a recent de-clutter, I found myself with 8 pieces of framing quality mountboard and decided to put them to good use. My personal brief was to use the 8 pieces of identically sized board (about 4" x 6") to create an illustrated story that could stand alone as a narrative piece. The above is just one of the scenes that will eventually make up the tragic tale of the misguided knight Sir Ralph.

Musicians/Magicians?

Started as a doodle, ended up as a 6+ hour illustration.

A little pro bono work

We were asked to design a logo for a youth football league in Kenya. Here are some of our initial thoughts...



We really like the idea of using  a pack animal as the champion - it seems to represent the qualities of a team and... it's a little less obvious than the ubiquitous lion.

Pixel Orca

Perhaps it's my love of 16bit era video games that makes me swoon over this awesome Douglas Coupland sculpture. Seen bursting out of a Vancouver promenade via engadget.com