I spent some time this afternoon playing with paper and rubber cement.

it's a very rough draft, but a start.

Well, this is a bad idea.

415, count em, 415 sharp metal objects in a blister pack on a hang card! Once you open it, it can never be closed again. What to do with the 412 of these that you don't have immediate use for?

Next up: packaging design

I think I can improve on this. Not only is it an idiotic way to package this type of product, it's almost as if they went out of the way to make the graphic design on the card as bland and uninspiring as possible.

I have a problem in that I forget to save an extra copy of my pieces as a JPEG (and can't post them as illustrator or photoshop files). It means that a lot of the work I do doesn't make it onto this blog. This image of my finished book jacket design was taken by a drone aircraft hovering 5000 ft above my house.

For the next project I will have to design a book jacket for a novel. The novel I have chosen is a book that I read as a teenager and loved, Narcissus and Goldmund by Hermann Hesse. It's the story of two friends in the medieval Europe and how our personalities affect the paths that our lives take.

This is what the cover of the book I read in high school looked like and the following are examples of other artwork that has been used for the cover of this book.

The nice thing about this project was that for the first time I really felt like I was using Adobe Illustrator to create an actual illustration.

The next project we wound up working on was to be a poster for a music event. For my poster I chose an actual concert that Elvis Costello happened to be performing in Dublin, Ireland this month. Before I started I created a mood board for the piece.

As you watch the Top of the Pops youtube link below, think about The Eagles, think about Fleetwood Mac, think about Rod Stewart, think about men with long feathered hair and shirts unbuttoned to their navels and gold chains and flaired jeans and platform shoes. That was how everyone dressed. It was a uniform. Here comes this guy with short, cropped hair, who wore suits and dark rimmed glasses. In 1976 the only person you knew who dressed that way was your grandfather. His sartorial choices were shocking, but so was the depth and originality of his lyrics and the fact that he spit words out like bullets. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHmX1wbdBoA

He went on to become a huge influence on Generations of singers and songwriters since. The link below is Fiona Apple covering a song of his from the mid 80's with him and his band (sorry, his original recording is much more striking than the cover)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAJ2HK2Epqs

Or if you don't like Fiona Apple, here's an interesting thing about The Beastie Boys.
watch both of them
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6H_6pHfKRqU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0E6fvVaVgOQ

So, I have been very remiss in updating this blog over the last couple of weeks. October has kinda gotten away from me. I'm sorry and I intend to remedy that. Below are the finished ads I created for Mini Cooper.

My concept involved taking a brand that was established very successfully back in the late 50's and then relaunched in the 2000's and using images of the contemporary cars placed in the types of ads you would find for cars in the 50's and 60's to draw a connection between the current brand and it's well loved history.