Dinosaur masks

…or, my job is the best in the world.

Last winter I created dinosaur illustrations for Cardiff’s National Museum of Wales. They helped tell the tale of Albie, a nervous Apatosaurus, and his adventures through the noisy Jurassic jungle. This tale in turn helped illustrate to young children the noises we believe dinosaurs made.

Last month, the Museum got in touch again. They wanted some quick, simple line-art dinosaur masks that, after visiting the Museum’s fantastic dinosaur displays, children could paint, crayon, stick lentils and pasta shapes to and generally do all the messy things little nippers like to do when Making Something.

I got books out from the library, looked up images on line and penciled out the drawings for approval. To retain some of the skull shape of the dinos, I put the eye-holes where the nostrils are on most of the masks. After approval I inked them with brush and indian ink.

I can’t believe I get paid to do this stuff.

 

 

 

 

 

Be Amazing Today illustration

Well, so I’m waiting for someone to send me a logo so I can finish of a layout they’ve asked me to do, and instead of frittering my time away looking at cowboy boots on ebay I thought I’d do constructive, ie., show y’all a purty picture.

The lovely Noreen of be amazing today commissioned me to create an illustration for her: something she could use on her website, newsletters and other publications. She gave me a very loose brief, and basically told me to use my instinct. I both love it and hate it when clients say that – it’s wonderful when people place such faith in you, but it makes things quite pressurised! Anyhow, I started doodling in graphite pencil, brought the doodle into Photoshop and added colour and more texture, as well as her logo. I then sent Noreen the result. She loved it – phew! Here it is:

CIO Connect Conference things

Hello, this one’s a bit late too. I’m catching up, see. Being organised and that.

CIO Connect asked me to create a brand for their annual conference, held in October. The title was “Business as Unusual”. I was to create a logo-illustration for the event, and supply designs for tickets, a microsite, brochures, newsletters, an invite for a PA party and all the surrounding bits and bobs to go with it.

The first thing I did was come up with some concepts for the logo-illustration. One was approved – a cube morphing into the CIO Connect marble, which I’d designed some time before.

After this, I could come up with the brochure design, which was created with in-house printing in mind (hence the 10mm border around everything):


I also designed an invite to go out to PAs of the CIOs invited to the conference, requesting their attendance at a party thrown for them. CIO wanted something elegant and a little more feminine, although not overly so (not all PAs are women and not all women appreciate girly designs). I came up with a design using Japanese cherry blossom and the CIO Connect green. It folds up, so that when placed on a desk with the green front towards you, the white back faces away and advertises the event to the PA’s CIO boss. Clever, see?

And the other significant thing I designed was the CIO Connect Conference microsite. I supplied a photoshop document and then a CSS wizard created the live site, which can still be found here at the moment. Here’s my original design:

Latest CIO Connect magazine

Well, yes, it’s a tad late. I need some blogging discipline. Anyhow, here’s the latest copy of CIO Connect. This one was a bit more complex that usual in that the client wanted to include an eight-page report of their conference, and then get the magazine out as quickly as possible.

Print consultant David Richards suggested that we design, proof-read and print the rest of the magazine first, and then bang out the eight-page section in the few days after the conference. I sent this section to press, and the printers inserted the new pages into the earlier ones, then printed and bound it. Bish bosh.