…and I was very happy to be asked to design the brochure for Cardiff’s huge annual event. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend this year’s party but have been assured that a fabulous time was had by all.

Peacocktastic

I wanted to create an image for the cover that would scream Mardi Gras without using people. I wanted bright and bold and elegant; I wanted something that would need no translation. Hence this rather dashing bird.

I had the wonderful opportunity to advertise with the brochure, too. Here’s my effort:

Anyhoo, what happened was last summer the National Roman Legion Museum in Caerleon contacted me about a newly-conceived project involving a magazine by young people for young people that would help illustrate parts of Roman history relevant to the lives of teenagers. “We want it to look a bit like Kerrang!,” they said. “No problem,” I said.

The main differences between Kerrang! and this little publication are that a) FYI only has six pages per language (it’s a bilingual flip-and-turn type thing) and b) Kerrang! has an awful lot more information on each page. Luckily we managed to source some interesting photos, and with a little photoshop magic to increase the grunginess I think FYI captures some of the action.

It took a little while for the students to arrange the subjects and copy they wanted including, so the project developed slowly over the months, and finally went to press in March. Many of the images were supplied by the Museum, some I found free on websites like Stock Exchange and some I provided or illustrated myself. Inky and charcoaly lines, lots of textures and halftone patterns and a limited colour palette help roughen the look.

For extra interest, the little mag is 90% of the size of A4 (it’s a good thing to note how much more attractive non-standard-sized publications are to readers) and is beautifully finished on silk stock, thanks to sourcing print via my brilliant independent print sales expert. The Museum emailed me to say that they are really happy with the finished product. Phew!

I was asked by staff in the Learning Department to come up with designs that looked a bit like scrap books, while still retaining the Museum’s branding style. The two booklets – one for the Clore Discovery Centre and one for the newly re-opened art galleries – are thus filled with scanned scraps of paper, post-it notes, paper-clips, sellotape, Polaroid photos and blu-tak.

I used three typefaces on each project – Univers, which is the Museum’s standard typeface, to ensure brand consistency, a rough typewriter font (one that works with the ŵs of the Welsh language, too – hooray!) for highlighted text, and crumpled playful grungy fonts for the headers.

The booklets are Welsh one side and English the other, with a united page in the centre spread that works for both.

I did plenty of fun quick little illustrations for each booklet – starred asterisks, inky boxes, felt-pen trophies and hands pulling shapes. Click on any pic for bigger.

The challenge for this sort of work is two-fold. Firstly, the booklets were to be interesting and engaging and have this rough, curated feel. I was shown examples of other museums’ efforts and asked if I could produce something that didn’t copy them but had the same hand-finished feel. Yet the booklets still had sit within the Museum’s branding and not feel at odds with the rest of their publications. This is achieved with the band at the top of each cover, and with the Museum’s own typeface as body-copy, as mentioned.

Secondly, when presented with a request to create something that feels hand-made and cobbled together, there’s a real risk of a lack of balance. It’s pretty easy to enter the perilous realm of the dog’s breakfast. The thing to do is to establish some rules. I stuck to a rigid three-column grid with 5mm margins. Overall, colours are fairly limited, margins are always adhered to and there is a consistency of inky line all the way through. The post-its are regular little notes to encourage readers to act, and all the pages are given structure with standard headers.

Hope you like these as much as I do!

But all that glitter and gloss costs money. What about the companies that don’t want to spend so much, but still desire a handsome regular publication to share with their members, customers, shareholders or what have you?

Never fear, it can be done. There’s a step up from the self-produced mediocrities begat by Microsoft Publisher, Comic Sans and clip-art. It’s possible to get a rather smart-looking result, using a skilled designer, cheap stock images and custom illustration. I design and illustrate such a publication. I’m not entirely sure if you’d call it a newsletter or a magazine. It’s a 16-page quarterly thingumy. The client supplies stories that their members have written along with thumbnail pics of the authors, an editor edits and collates, I illustrate a cover incorporating the arrow of the client’s logo and a reflection of the subject matters covered or the season we’re in. This season being Spring (and as I type, the sky is obediently blue, the daffodils obediently flashing upon that inward eye which is the bliss of solitude, and the sparrows obediently chirpy), I done made a nest of arrows and what-not. I have a thing about cardboard backgrounds (have you noticed? You have?) as they lend texture and earthiness to vector-based illustrations which can often be toe-curlingly clean and false. Here’s the cover (click on the image for a bigger version if you like):

The illustration avoids us having to source what could be a very expensive cover photograph, plus it helps give style and character to the thingumy. Inside, I’ve kept everything very clean and clear, devising a layout which is quick and simple for me to lay out, thus saving money:

Stock imagery is often difficult to use without it being a touch cheesy. I try to circumvent this by the use of interesting cropping and wrapping text around. Where possible I don’t choose the obvious image, but of course I am limited to what the image libraries can supply. Keeping everything clean and aligned to a grid adds needed class.

So, there’s a middle ground. It’s possible to get interesting professional magazine design on a budget. It’s a line of work that can be really enjoyable, too. I think what makes Pulse a success is that I’m pretty much left to get on with it – and I find that when clients have that level of trust, designers can really step up to the mark.

Judging by how frequently it happens, I can’t be the only person who works from home to hear the words “You must be very disciplined” all of the time. My response is generally that I don’t consider myself to be so. Look at those crazy 9 to 5-ers – getting up at the same time every day, ironing their clothes (pfft! what?), applying makeup, making packed lunches and even removing their dressing gown before starting work. That’s discipline.

I work to a more, ahem, flexible pattern.

Some days I’ll be up with the birdies, watching the sun come up and the lorries deliver bread and milk to the supermarket across the road. I’ll be doodling new illustration ideas, thinking about how to improve my website, cursing myself for not thinking up that awesome design solution before that brochure went to press. Or I’ll use that early-ness to go surfing, or practise yoga.

Other days I’ll wake up about the same time the rest of you are shuffling into your offices. I’ll blearily check my phone for emails and mooch into the next room to start the day. There’ll be a hiatus for a few hours in the evening when I go to my Welsh evening class and then I’ll work again until late upon my return.

What I’m starting to wonder is: is this right? Is this healthy? Is this me at my most productive? I don’t need discipline at all to do my work. None whatsoever. It’s my top priority – there is no other option. Even at my most stressed, I keep on. I may as well have a gun to my head, I’m that dedicated. What I do need discipline for is the other stuff – making time for washing up and riding waves. I’m waking up to the fact that these things are necessary – just as vital as money for the mortgage.

These are the things I need to have in order to be at my most productive/creative:

• clean & tidy environment (housework)
• clean & tidy mind & body (yoga, meditation, surfing, walks in the park, etc)

I’m beginning to appreciate the meaning of that clichéd mantra short-term pain, long-term gain (I’m a slow learner sometimes). Discipline, for me, is regularly doing the things you don’t have to do, because you know they’ll make things better in the long run.

And that is something I don’t have nearly enough of. But I’m working on it…

Anyway, apropos of nothing, here are some little close-ups of stuff I’ve been doing, plus a doodle of a pterodactyl-skull-shaped putty rubber doing a song and dance routine. I’ve got a few projects on the go, so I can only show you selected highlights for now…

I drew this work in pencil, over-worked with indian ink and brush, and coloured up in Photoshop.

Creating a caricature/illustration of someone you have never met is a little scary, but Sister Raven’s friends insist I have captured hir perfectly. Yay!

I’ve held back posting this story in the dim hope that the matter would be resolved. I’m one of those bouncy eternal-optimist types who believes that every story has a happy ending, etc etc. But it looks like I’m never going to get paid for this job, and as the client is apparently broke, I don’t have the heart to go down the legal route. And I’m so proud of this logo I can’t just leave it on the shelf, gathering dust. I want you to see it!

A woman called me up and asked me to meet her to discuss a possible branding job for a little coffee van she’d bought at great expense. Twas a cute little thing which she could drive around to festivals and markets and what-not, and instead of an urn and a large bucket of Nescafé, within the van was housed a proper Italian coffee maker. She was a dramatic type of person and loved burlesque and the circus, and wanted a fun, family-friendly logo that reflected all this. She’d asked a few designers and agencies to come up with ideas before choosing who to go with, as she didn’t want to get messed around (oh, the irony, huh?

I was confident I could give her a good idea, but didn’t want to waste too much time on something that I wasn’t going to get paid for (ha ha) so I sketched her the rough below and sent her a description of how the final would look in my head.

She loved it, it was exactly what she wanted, and so she commissioned me to go ahead with my idea. She had a lot of fantastic ideas about what she’d also want from me – business cards that would look like a Tarot card, a whole Moulin Rouge-themed coffee shop branding, a chain of coffee shops – and, if I’m honest, alarm bells started to go off. The people who get too far ahead of themselves and are not focused on the very next step they need to take are often the dreamers. It’s one thing to think about the big picture and have an aim, but you can often tell by the way someone talks how grounded their dreams are in reality.

Anyway, I re-drew and firmed up the pencil sketch to her requirements and started to create the illustrator document you see at the top of this blog which would form the outlines of the logo. About the time this stage was coming to completion (the lettering still needs a touch of work), I started to get signs from her that all was not going well financially. I’d invoiced her 50% of the total when the pencil sketch was approved and this was becoming late, despite her repeated assurances that she would pay me “tomorrow”. I felt sorry for her as she was obviously going through a rough time emotionally, but said to her I was concerned I wasn’t going to get paid at all, so invoiced the full amount, which she said she was fine with. I said I would complete the logo as soon as I’d been paid. That was in November 2009. In March 2010, with end of tax year in mind, I emailed her and said if she didn’t pay me by the end of the month I would write off the invoice as a bad debt. She begged for an extension and promised to pay me in July, the time of many outdoor festivals where her van could potentially earn her money. Suffice it to say I never heard from her again.

So here is the logo as imagine it would have looked. The van was painted crimson red, and we planned to have the hand-drawn lettering in gold. It’s a sad story as it’s probably my favourite of all the logos I’ve done, and I was looking forward to seeing it on the side of her little van. Such is life.

The lessons I learned from this experience are thus:

• - I now ask for 30-50% up front from all new clients, depending on the size of the job. All of my regular clients get the usual 30 days’ credit. If someone is serious about me pouring my heart and soul into something for them, they won’t resent this.
• - Proceed with caution when dealing with dreamers. If their heads are in the clouds, check their feet are on the ground, too.
• - If clients start to dawdle and keep delaying the completion of the work, they may well be attempting to delay your invoice.

I’ve been too bloody nice about things in the past, and I suppose it’s a testament to luck that I’ve only been messed around two other times like this in the seven years I’ve been doing this. If I’d been a bit more business-like from the start at least I would have got paid for half of the job. It’s a difficult balance – you don’t want to be seen as too hard-nosed, but on the other hand clients have got to understand I’m not in this job for the benefit of my health, and that I expect them to take the effort I put into their work seriously.

I’d love to hear about how other designers have handled similar situations. Do you insist on money up front? Have you had lawyers draw up a contract for you, or have you had to use them to get money you’ve earned? Feedback welcome!

You’re creating something that has to have a coherent look and feel and, in this case, complement the branding of CIO Connect the organisation. But each article must stand out in its own right as a unit separate from the rest. It’s getting this balance right that’s the difficult, and fun part. My aims are to keep the magazine looking fresh, elegant and dynamic, and to have the design reflect both the tone of the text and the various photography and illustration we use.

I’m particularly proud of this issue. It’s my favourite so far. I don’t feel I can claim too much credit though – I find the photography of Martin Burton and the illustrations of Tony Sigley very inspiring – they (to me) make it obvious how the rest of the article should look.

One thing that I image is a headache for all art editors is getting a consistent quality of photography from all contributors. Unless your Vogue magazine or some such, it’s often logistically impossible, for budgetary or distance reasons or whatever, to get a good photographer to the subject, so we have to rely on photos supplied by the interviewee or their PR. Some PRs seem to understand that if they send an amazing photo through, their client is more likely to be given priority in a spread. Unfortunately, most have yet to grasp this sacred truth, so the majority of photos I’m sent are low-resolution atrocities taken by amateurs, or at best, wooden head and shoulders shots taken in front of one of those terrible backgrounds photographers usually reserve for school photos. Puh-leeeze! I’ve been sent a passport photo in the past. No word of a lie. Anyway, for one particular spread we didn’t have many decent photos, so I did an illustration, and used the photos small. I’ve done illustrations for CIO Connect before, but only smooth glassy “brand” type ones of the marbles they have in their logo. This was my first splotchy ink-and-brush affair for them, on the subject of negotiation, and I’m rather happy with it. By the way, you can click on any of the images to see a bigger version.

The film itself is a masterpiece of kitsch, shot on 8mm film, opulent saturated colours burning into the retina. It was created over seven years in a New York apartment, released without the permission of its (long-time anonymous) creator James Bidgood, and has been a highly-influential underground classic. In fact, after watching the bits available on YouTube I noticed that my music-video-making friends Casey Raymond and Ewan Jones Morris referenced some of that saturation and stop-motion animation creatures from it in their excellent video for Cate Le Bon’s single “Hollow Trees House Hounds”. The little thieves.

Anyhow, here’s my take on the still. The image was composed and sketched out in pencil, solidified with ink and brush, scanned into Photoshop where cardboard and fabric textures were added along with the intense colours. My aim was to retain the kitsch and the camp of the original, along with the colour, without losing the erotic power and active dynamism of our matador – although objectified, he is no passive wallflower. Click on the image for a bigger, more detailed look.