Where Have I Gone??

Hey everybody!

It’s been.. Well it’s been a very very long time since I have posted something on here. No real excuse other than University had been sucking the life out of me. Another excuse is that I have been under the idea that I would be designing and finishing up my website but that process has also been very very slow, almost stagnant. So I’m putting this post up to tell everyone that Yes I am still alive! And I will also tell you that as far as the Blog goes, It will remain pretty slow still. But I am still very active on Facebook and Twitter, putting up inspiration and any thing that is happening to me or around me. So for now, If you want to keep up to date on things I’m doing head over there.

Website and Blog design are beginning to happen so I’m hoping to start making some progress in that department.

Sorry everyone for my poor lack of communication! I promise, I do want to talk to you! So if you have any questions/propositions/commissions please don’t be afraid to ask!

I Now Have Twitter!!!!

Hey everyone! Just a quick update to let people know that I have finally made the jump and got myself a Twitter account!! If you have twitter, dont be shy, follow me cause I will be posting updates on everything design related! As always I still have my Facebook so also hit me up there!

Click it! Twitter

Thanks everyone! Got some exciting new projects in the pipeline so stay tuned!

 

Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb! New Poster!!

Hey everyone!

I was asked a couple of weeks ago to produce an Official Poster for an upcoming short film titled ‘Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb’, directed by Toby Wilkins (The Grudge 3, Teen Wolf, Splinter). Needless to say, I was pretty stoked! Got right to work and had a blast creating the poster! Working directly with Toby, he wanted the poster to have a minimalist form injected with my own flavour so that’s exactly how I approached it. The poster was a good exercise for me in dealing with clients, negotiating what they wanted and what I thought the image needed, and my attention to detail. This design you see here was not even close to what I had in mind at the beginning of the project but as the design came along from that original thought, I quickly changed and modified things to suit the client, and indeed the story. The poster focuses on the ideas of the script, focusing on ancient ‘tricks’ and ‘traps’, using gears as the way these tricks work, and how the pyramids move and shift.

Toby was an awesome guy to work with, very kind, friendly and very approachable. Even though we only exchanged emails, I could definitely sense his enthusiasm in the project, what he wanted from me and the way the project would eventually turn out to be. He was very guiding and helpful for me to hone where I was going, not letting me get too sidetracked in my thought processes and was very on-board with my ideas as well. An ideal client if I must say so myself!

The style of the poster is similar to how I completed my ‘Home-Blitz’ posters of earlier, with the speckle tone to create gradation and form. I used the project to really refine this style and I think I have managed to create a balance in what I like, so I think I am definitely going to continue with this style of creating images. I hand created the Typography myself, I really enjoyed this part of the process because I have been looking for an opportunity to really delve into creating some typography! taking some loose inspiration from the new iterations of ‘The Mummy’ (we’ll just casually forget about the filth that is The Mummy 3) and their end title sequences. What you see here is what I started and ended up with.
I also managed to get some Ancient Egyptian translation for the poster which I was totally psyched about! It was a rush to get it in but the Macquarie University came through for me on the last day and I quickly slotted them in! (Please note: The billing block at the bottom is fake! These are not the actors that will be involved, used as placeholder!)

I am really happy with the final design! The film hasn’t been funded yet but it will be going through the Kickstarter program to get money raised for it, and I think that is how my poster may be distributed! If you pledge a certain amount of money then you will receive my poster once it gets funded in its entirety. Once the project is created on Kickstarter I wil  post up the necessary links for anyone who feels that this project is worth investing in!

Can you guess what the Hieroglyphs say?
As always, give me a ‘Like’ on Facebook to see updates and various things on there!

New Poster: ‘Beauty and the Beast’!

University Holidays have begun which means freedom! Sort of.. I was commissioned to design a poster for my local College’s production of the 1991 animated Disney classic ‘Beauty and the Beast’. As I have wanted to design a poster (movie poster to be precise) of any sort for a long time this opportunity was quickly snatched up by myself. I hadn’t seen the film (I think maybe I had when I was little, but I couldn’t remember it) up until this time so it was fun to watch it, and it was fairly easy to see why it is considered a classic. I wanted to poster to feature some new techniques I have been trying out recently but I also had to be realistic in my efforts to achieve the poster deadline. Luckily (or unluckily depending on how you look at it) I was given creative freedom to go where I wanted with the poster, only considering the text that was fundamental to the poster. I wanted to sum up the movie with an iconic image, something that represents the whole film. Before I re-watched the movie I was instantly struck with the visual of the rose, then and there I knew that the rose was going to be the primary focus. The rose was a task and a half to say the least, as I was implementing new techniques that I still didn’t have a full grip on, the rose took a long time to complete. It probably took the longest bit of the whole poster.

As I have also stated in previous posts on this blog, Typography played an important part in the poster. I wanted something classy and elegant, with an obvious contrast as to the titular characters. I took a very manual process with this, sketching a lot first in order to get the right look before heading onto computer. The ‘beauty’ text took a long time to get right and looking elegant without overdoing the final effect. The ‘beast’ type was difficult to nail down at first, I wasn’t sure how to approach it, using serif’s, chunky fonts, thin fonts, something simple or something complicated. In the end I referred back to old movie posters and how they approached typography. A lot of posters uses a painted title and so that’s the road I ended up taking. I got out the paintbrush and started painting out the title which I am extremely glad worked out. Meshed the two together and this was what I got.

Here are some detailed shots of the poster:

I got a lot out of this project and I can say I am really happy with the final outcome! I am thinking about making this an art print for sale (without the text) if anybody is interested please let me know! I can’t wait to see these bad boys printed out and displayed around town. This is a 2 part project, with the 2nd part still to come which I will keep you updated on.

As always, hit me up on Facebook and have a chat with me!

New Project: Book Covers – George Orwell’s ’1984′ and ‘Animal Farm’

So, University has just finished for the first Semester and let me just say it wasn’t easy thats for sure. But nevertheless its over (for now) and for me, that is the main thing. I wanted to post a University project that I have just completed and once that I’m fairly happy with, especially the outcome. We had to redesign the book covers for George Orwell’s classics ’1984′ and ‘Animal Farm’ for Penguin Publications. Now I had no real prior knowledge to either book before but once I read the description and plot overviews, they were fairly depressing to say the least.

Our project was to redesign the book covers with an emphasis on abstraction. We were not allowed to show anything representational so all we had left was shapes so thats how I went about redesigning the covers. My ’1984′ cover focused on the themes of corruption, manipulation and control and my ‘Animal Farm’ cover focused on Power, Manipulation of Leadership whilst also referencing Russian history (Hammer and Sickle is another strong symbol in the book).

I also had a lot of fun with typography in this project. I have just come to realise lately how important typography is to the polish of a design/artwork. It can mean the unity and connectedness of a piece or it can be a standalone and dodgy element. I’ve always appreciated good typography but never really saw the drive to make typography look really good on a design. Lately I have been noticing it more and more and as my design sense broadens, I now see the value in taking the time to make typography look awesome. This is what I tried to implement in my design, a coherent typeface for both books. I custom made the ’1984′ typography which began with a flavour of 1920′s/Broadway style type infused with a futuristic/industrial feel. I also tried to keep it very angular so it would match the surface graphics I have. For the ‘Animal Farm’ type I went with a very Russian influenced design, researching fonts of with a distinctive Russian look to them I began to work up my design using the font ‘Gotham’ as a base.

Overall, I think the book cover project was an important one for me, it really opened my eyes to some important elements that I want to continue using in the future.

Enjoy, and let me know what you think!

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Minimalist Movie Poster Series (Older Work)

So I was re-reading some of my older posts and realised that I haven’t put up one of my most fun projects! My minimalist Movie Poster series! As you might have read from previous posts; I love Movie Posters, Especially boutique posters. There is just something special to me about posters, maybe its the combination blending two things I love, movies and art. Ever since I have been interested in taking Graphic Design past just a hobby, Movie Posters always have seemed to make an appearance on my screen, and ever since seeing the art collective Mondo, my interest in Posters has sky-rocketed. Following such amazing artists as Ken Taylor, Martin Ansin, Saul Bass, Kevin Tong, Phantom City Creative, James White (AKA Signalnoise) and many more has given me an outlook on this industry and it has also given me direction. I finally found a project at University that I was able to use this desire, but it came from an unusual brief for which I will explain.

The brief at the time was a ‘Sustainability’ Project in which we as the student/designer had to find something that we could sustain for 6 weeks. It could have been anything like Healthy Eating, Exercise, Drawing etc, but I went in a decidedly different direction. I decided to put the restriction on myself to create a Movie Poster a week for 6 weeks, using a minimalist style (representative of such artists as Olly Moss and Saul Bass) and the self-imposed restriction of 2-3 colours. The idea was to test Motivation, Inspiration, Creativity under Pressure, Conceptual driven artwork and Thematic Exploration and relevance.
In the beginning of the project I had no trouble with the posters, maybe it was because I already had an idea coming out of the gates but as the project reached its midpoint I already started to feel creatively drained. It was tough, trying to come up with smart concepts for every poster, then executing them, then repeating that process every week was a tough task I set for myself! But nevertheless I persevered and managed to finish them all on deadline and I have to say I am fairly pleased with all of them.

They all turned out decent enough and it does inspire me to keep creating, however I dont want people to think that I have purposefully ripped off Olly Moss. Olly Moss is a master in his creations, he has a very distinct style that only he creates, people try to rip from him but everybody who know’s Olly’s work would know the flaws. My posters, while I was inspired by Olly and Bass, I wasn’t purposefully trying to rip from them. The reason I went for a minimalist style is because this style requires a smart concept in order for it to really work, this is what I was trying to test out, whether or not I would be able to generate smart concepts in a very restricted time limit.

So without further or due, here are my series of Minimalist posters (In order of Creation week)

Enjoy and Thank You!

New Posters: Homeblitz Gig Posters

I have done it again, I haven’t updated this blog in a long time and for that I am really sorry. Time escapes me and I forget about updating and then when I mean to something happens and I postpone it etc… Anyway. I have been tremendously busy these past couple of weeks finishing up University projects and what not and I would really like to share a new project that has sucked up a lot of time lately. For University, we got a brief that stipulated that we needed to create 3 Gig Posters for a band called Homeblitz. This band is a garage/pop/punk band that relies heavily on its naive and loud sound and lo-fi recording. I found this to be a really cool project because Posters are a field that I want to head into so I wanted to do my very best work and trial new techniques. It was a brutal project, especially with my coming down with a virus in the middle of it rendering me useless for nearly a week. But nevertheless I persevered and managed to complete them and this is what I have to show for it.

Now, unintentionally there is an inherent ‘Space’ theme which I realised once I had changed one of my ideas, but Homeblitz’s music isn’t space theme. The idea and concept behind the picture was that one of the band’s song title’s is ‘Perpetual Night’. I took this title to a visual standpoint and decided to base my pictures around the idea of a cataclysmic event happening, something that would result in a ‘Perpetual Night’ so to speak, another reason for this specific imagery is the band’s loud, epic sounds. I wanted to reflect their epic sound in my posters. I really liked the way these posters turned out, especially when printed, I think they looked really good and scale worked really well too, which I was pleased about! So let me know your thoughts!

Cheers!