Art Directors Club — Young Guns 13 Award

I’m insanely chuffed to announce I have been selected for the Art Directors Club Young Guns 13th class

ADC Young Guns is an international portfolio competition for creative professionals, including designers, art directors, photographers, illustrators aged 30 and under.

My portfolio of 8 projects was selected (along with 18 others) from hundreds of entrants to join the elusive Young Ranks ranks alongside past winners such as Stefan Sagmeister, Jessica Walsh, James Victore, Alex Trochut and Kate Moross. See the full list here http://adcglobal.org/awards/adc-young-guns-13/yg13-winners/

I’ll be off to New York next week to pick up my Young Guns Cube, which is made from past and present winners ephemera, crushed down into this years trophy, designed by Dark Igloo.

The winning work will be on display in the ADC Gallery in New York for a month, more info here if you’re in the neighbourhood and wanted pop in

More images to follow soon

A new adventure

After almost seven brilliant years at Purpose – I am moving on to become my very own company. I will be available for freelance work, hopefully build up some of my own client work and who knows even start those side projects I’ve also rambled on about but never done!

What a gift

So my time at Purpose has come to end. Sob. Such an incredible studio and an amazing bunch of people – who know me so well. I was very lucky to get an illuminated ‘P’ and a Muller Brockmann Opernhaus Zürich poster as a leaving gift. Looking forward to getting them up on my walls!

A s**t poster

A sneaky peak of the poster I designed for the Purpose gang for my departing. I have a reputation for a bit of a foul mouth and have been concerned the level of language may improve in my absence, so this poster is always around to lower the tone. Very kindly and beautifully screen printed in fluoro orange by Gary at The Private Press. More images to follow soon

Picked up an ISTD

The ISTD International Typographic Awards are held each year to celebrate and appraise standards of excellence in typographic design, and are judged by some of today’s leading graphic, interactive and typographic design specialists, chosen to reflect a diversity of expertise within the design industry.

I'm delighted to announce in this years awards myself and Robin Howie scooped a Premier Award for the design of our Simon Beattie Shortlists (5&6) and the identity I did for Apprenticeships at Purpose received a Certificate of Excellence – Happy Days!

Ditchling Museum of Art and Craft – Paying Compliments exhibition

I was recently  invited to submit a piece for and exhibit called ‘Paying Compliments’ to celebrate Ditchling Museum of Art and Craft’s 1st birthday. A selection of artists were given a word from some of the museums comments cards to illustrate – I had 'outstanding'. The whole set can be viewed here and purchased from here in an online auction.

And if you’ve never been to Ditchling Museum of Art and Craft and you like design and typographer – get there as soon as you can. It’s a beautifully designed museum with heaps of interesting exhibits. Eric Gill was part of designers guild based in Ditchling – so a lot of history there… and also some lovely boozers!

Signwriter extraordinaire

As designers these days we spend a lot of our time sat in front of our macs – so it was lovely to spend a couple of days up some scaffolding with a pot of paint and a paint brush. I have recently been working on a new identity for Purpose with fellow colleagues Amie and Hannah with some beautiful new typefaces from the excellence Klim type foundry. So it was only right we painted some big old type on the front of our building. 

Comic Sans vs Cancer

This year the font we all love to hate – Comic Sans – is celebrating it's 20th birthday and what better way to celebrate than brief to help eradicate something we all hate far more – Cancer.

Around 500 creatives took part in the brief to design a poster using Comic Sans – love it or hate it you could design a poster that conveyed your thoughts on this renowned typeface. Me and the Purpose gang took part and were lucky enough o be included in both the final exhibition and the beautifully designed book. Posters were sold on the night along with the book and all proceeds raised from the sale went to Cancer Research UK with the total reaching well over £5,000 so far. For more information, please click here.

“Over £5000 raised for Cancer Research UK”

What does being 'In Book' mean? – D&AD Interview

I was recently interviewed by D&AD about what it means to get into the D&AD Annual. I’ve been lucky enough to win five In Book awards in my time – still awaiting that elusive pencil. You can read the interview here

New Work: Wolves Fancast

One of my true passions is life is for my football team, Wolves. I may be biased – but I’m lucky to support a club with the very best crest out there. So when the opportunity came to design a logo for the Wolves Fancast – I jumped at it. I enjoy listening each week to the guys and feel honoured that the podcasts now come with the logo I designed on them. If you so wish you can listen to the musings of the Fancast chaps here. They’re also up for an award at this years Football Blogging Awards for best podcast – of course I can’t take much credit for it, but like to think the logo has helped somewhat.

Monogram logo

I love a good monogram – they are one of my favourite things to design. So I was very chuffed to have two of my own monograms included in this recent book by Celine Leterme, published through Counterprint. The logo’s I designed for Alex Stroud whilst at Purpose and D&B Books were both included.

New Work: D&B Books

I’ve recently completely an identity for Dunn & Bennett books, a small start-up publishers. So far I’ve designed their monogram logo and stationery, but more work is in the pipeline with a growing identity suite and hopefully the odd book along the way.

Smelling of Roses

Thursday 15th of May was a great evening all round for the Purpose team, as we celebrated some brilliant awards results in both Manchester and London.

Me and Amie we're up in Manchester for the Roses Creative Awards, where we won a gold for our San Fran poster in the Craft – Typography category, as well as a bronze for our Apprenticeship Awards identity in the Exhibition category. We were also nominated for the highly regarded Grand Prix – another great achievement.

Stu and Hannah attended the Design Week Awards in London, and we picked up a Category Win for the San Fran poster in the Poster design category.

Richard Beeston Bursary

I have recently completed an identity for a fabulous cause – The Richard Beeston Bursary. Richard was a distinguished and much-loved foreign editor of The Times, who sadly died of cancer in 2013 soon after his 50th birthday. Richard's wife Natasha has set up a Busary in his honour for aspiring British foreign correspondents to spend six weeks abroad, researching and reporting a foreign news story, on a fellowship with The Times newspaper.

I created a monogram for the bursary, a call for entries leaflet and worked with good friend Nic Flook to design a website for the Bursary.

Pick Me Up

May the 5th saw me and my band of disciples from Purpose descend on the Pick Me Up event space at Somerset House. We had a custom made typographic confession booth allowing guests to enter and share their typographic sins and guilty pleasures on the walls of the booth.

The order of the day consisted of a series of three sermons firstly looking at my book came in to being and the process involved in writing and designing it. Secondly, a humorous look through a series of typographic mishaps, and finally, looking at the inspiration behind some of today's leading designers and typographers.

Alongside the confession booth and sermons, guests also had the opportunity to create their very own divine works of illumination with our stained glass window alphabet workshop. They could customise a frame of their choice using coloured transparencies to create a bespoke illuminated character.

A huge thanks to everyone who made it down, the guys at Artworks Solutions for their help on building the confession booth, GF Smith for providing the paper for our letters, to David, Steve, Tom, Jamie, Owen, Luke, Phil, Steven, Robin, Sean, Rob – the designers who gave up their time to contribute to the Divine Inspiration lecture, My Dad for printing the leaflets and also to Pick Me Up for such a fantastic opportunity. Bless you all.

Sins Serif: Confessions of a Typographer at Pick Me Up –Somerset House

I'm very excited to be taking part in this year’s Pick Me Up, a brilliant annual graphic arts festival based at Somerset House in London.

Running for its fifth year, Pick Me Up is a vibrant contemporary festival showcasing everything graphic art-related, from both new and established illustrators and designers showcasing their work, to events, talks and interactive workshops to get involved in.

On Monday 5 May, Purpose have been invited to organise a day of typographic loves, hates and guilty pleasures entitled ‘Sins Serif: Confessions of a Typographer’. We’ve got a range of sinful activities lined up, including a series of sermons and creative workshops, where you’ll have the chance to create your very own typographic masterpieces. In need of some soul cleansing? Why not enter our very own confession booth and share all your typographic guilty pleasures.

Moving away from the traditional art fair, the festival looks set to be a fun, eclectic mix of events, and you can find out more about the programme here. You can also follow Sins Serif through their Twitter account here - make sure you tweet your confessions to @SinsSerif if you’d like to see them projected around the event space.

Join us on 5 May and seek typographic redemption at Somerset House.

YCN Interview

I was recently interviewed by the team at YCN about my recent collaboration with Royal Mail, and the tough task of telling ten Remarkable stories within 35mm of space.

As a 2013 YCN Award winner, I was invited to share my role in the Remarkable Lives project along with some of the challenges we faced – namely trying to tell these “incredibly rich stories in such a limited amount of space”.

Find out more about what I've been up to since winning the award and the process behind creating the stamps, in the interview here.

100/100 Beer from SB Studio

A dream of a brief to design a beer label for a specially brewed Liverpudlian craft beer. 

100/100 is a live collaborative experiment between the public and a carefully selected group of 100 artists, illustrators, designers and writers.

100 bottles, 100 names, 100 collaborators, 100 unique identities.

In December SB Studio asked the public to help name their very own wheat beer specially crafted by The Liverpool Craft Beer Co. Out of 1,000 entries they shortlisted 100 names and 100 collaborators, including myself and good friend Amie Herriott, were invited to design 100 unique labels for each. With all 100 beers to be auctioned in aid of the Art Fund. 

The design of our chosen beer name – 'Satan's Bastille' – features Satan’s looming pitchfork in the red soaked shadow cast by the portcullis of the bastille – a fortified Parisian prison destroyed at the beginning of the French Revolution.

InsideOut SF Poster

We were recently approached at Purpose by Mucho, and AIGA San Francisco to contribute a poster depicting our interpretation of the city of San Francisco, for an upcoming exhibition entitled InsideOut SF.

The exhibition will explore the variety of interpretations and opinions on this popular destination. A stellar list of contributors from the Bay Area (Inside) and leading creatives from around the World (Out), were asked to give their graphical perception of the city.

Our earliest memory of San Francisco comes from the geography classroom and learning about the world’s fault lines – the most famous being the San Andreas Fault. We experimented with the fragility of a city on a fault line and produced a two leaved poster. The top sheet being torn in half through middle of the typography, to reveal the fault line running through San Fran.

The posters will be on display and available for purchase in a silent auction at the AIGA/SF Fall Gala at Terra Gallery, on 12 November, with money raised funding scholarships and educational and community events throughout the year.

The posters were produced on two different GF Smith Colorplan embossings, printed in two colours, hand torn and the two leaves then combined to create the final poster. A huge thanks to GF Smith for providing the lovely embossed Colorplan and to Darwin Press for all their help with the print.

http://insideoutsf.org/ 

Glory Glory

Designers Nick Blakeman, Alex Brown and Craig Oldham curated an exhibition of typographic posters based on football chants. More than 60 studios and designers from the UK and Europe contributed to the project.

The show ran for just one night but giclee prints of the posters and an accompanying book were  available to buy, with all proceeds going to British Blind Sport.

Our submission was based on a chant by Ipswich fans about local rivals Norwich City to the tune of The Addams Family – we even created our own footy themed version of Thing, clothed in a goalie glove!