Sara (cf. previous tree work for Ealing Council) asked me to come up with A1 posters for an exhibition of photography by a young persons’ group in Ealing, London. She wanted lots of white space, black text, but most of all they had to look cool. “Cool” is a terrifying word to a graphic designer, mostly because it means different things to different people.

Also, I’m not too old to realise that a lot of the design that’s aimed at people in their late teens that attempts to be cool is toe-curling. It tries real hard but it ain’t quite hip, as the song goes.

So what this 32-year-old graphic designer in Cardiff, c/o The Provinces decided to do for the urban youth in London was just to keep it simple. Careful arrangement of the images and text (using Trade Gothic Condensed, a typeface which is ineffably cool already), gracefully contained in some inked lines. I love them. I hope they do, too…

I received a phone call on Saturday from Sara – a friend of a friend. “I hear you’re a brilliant graphic designer?” she said. “Um, I think so,” I think I replied. She had been let down and needed someone to design some large (6ft x 2.5ft) billboards for a local park. They were to stand next to two beautiful Cedars of Lebanon – old, much-loved but ailing trees which are in danger of dropping their substantial branches on passing school-children and picnic-eaters.

The billboards present tomograms to the public – sound-wave generated images which show how rotten the trees are. The public are asked to contribute their ideas about what should happen to the trees.

I brush-and-inked the tree illustration and transferred it to Illustrator, where I added the copy, the Ealing Council and Heritage Lottery Fund logos, and the tomogram images. I did most of the work yesterday until late last night, making final amends today. All gone off to print now – and they should be up under the trees on Saturday. Phew!

I’ve got another project for Sara and Ealing in the pipeline which I’ll probably be able to post up tomorrow.

Hello, crazy-busy today. Just a quick note to show you these little critters I drew for the National Museum in Cardiff. They’re brush and ink, and simple as they’re reproduced pretty small in some activity sheets I’ve designed for the Museum. Hope you like them!

A quick little post about a publication I design called Pulse. It’s a kind of cross between a newsletter and a magazine, being only 16 pages long at the moment. I create an illustration for the cover every issue, and each illustration features the arrow from the logo. This one’s about reaching base camp, and looking forward to the big climb.

I recently read a quote somewhere that went something like “graphic design is for artists that can’t draw”, which is probably the biggest steaming pile of bull I’ve seen in a while. A) all the graphic designers I know can draw to some extent and b) graphic design is not art: in my humble opinion, graphic design is to art what journalism is to literature. Its aim is the obvious communication of a message, rather than the provocation of ineffable feelings etc. Either can do both, but the aim of each is (or should be) markedly different.

That rambling aside, I’ve been commissioned to do a few paintings recently. Some I can’t show you, as the commissioner wants to keep them private for now, but this one I have permission to display. It’s for a friend of mine who provides massage therapy – he gave me a specific brief with the tree and the animals, as these things are important to him in the way he massages. The painting will be hung in his therapy room to inspire him as he works. I’m pleased to say he loves it.

A little note about my style – it isn’t something I really choose – it came to me when painting for a friend a couple of years back and has stuck. I guess it’s quite naïve and not entirely figurative. There’s something there about shapes that fit together and the way everything is connected. I’m not really interested in paintings that represent accurately – they don’t tell me anything.

The dark things that live in my head, etc

Here’s a quick note just showcasing a few of the pages from the latest CIO Connect magazine. The mag will be slightly updated in time for the next issue – nothing dramatic, just a refresh.

My motivation is always to keep it looking clean, fresh and professional, and never dull. Editor Mark Samuels is always pushing me to be creative & appreciates the importance of brilliant photography in making a magazine look as good as it can – making my job much easier, too.

Wooooo! Shiny new Wordpress site! Very happy with it right now but will probably tweak pages etc over the next few weeks. Now my website and blog can all be in one seamless glorious place.

A little plugin called Blogger Importer doesn’t appear to be working, so at present I can’t import my old posts. If you’d like to see them, they’re still here.

Wordpress is great for several reasons – it’s w3 compatible and very search-engine friendly. Disparity of appearance between various browsers is limited, and this and the fact it’s prettified using Cascading Style Sheets mean that, provided they know their CSS, designers have maximum control over how a site looks.

This is the first site I’ve designed using WP, but I have a few more in the pipeline – watch this space.