Wacky bird stickers

George Plionis makes fantastic jewellery. I bought one of his rings long before we'd met, and it's still one of my favourite pieces. These stickers are for the packaging of his latest range, designed around the idea of a bird's nest after the bird has left. He wanted Australian birds, "a bit wrong looking". Line drawings with water colour highlights. I'll load some photos of the stickers on boxes later. George's folio/shop site is here.

Trunk book contribution

This illustration appears alongside Rebecca Huntley's essay 'Serious hair', in the first volume of Trunk books. The book is a beautiful thing, purchase a copy here.

Book (ends)

These spreads are from my final work at university in 2002. The text is my dissertation – a conversation between a print book and a digital book in a bar. The print book's depressed because everyone keeps telling him he's dying. The digital book is nervous that he won't live up to expectations of the technophiles. They draw up a divorce settlement for information, each keeping what's most appropriate to their form. I was really happy with this at the time, but it now seems twee. Growth is good. ABOVE: Top left is a letter from me to the reader, explaining why I love books and why I made this one. Top right shows the little book bound into the spine – it's a bookmark and tells the story of Claude, a boy who plants a book hoping to make more books grow. Bottom left are Digital and Print, experiencing a moment of awkward silence when they meet. Bbottom right shows how to flip a book that is die cut into one section of the book. Below: more spreads.

Brown Paper Tiger tshirts

Around 2006 I started an online t-shirt business with my mate Ollie, called Brown Paper Tiger. 'Business' is a formal way of saying 'hobby': there's a lot more love than money involved, but I get a kick out of seeing people wearing my drawings. The business folded, but you can still purchase shirts online here.

Notes on Book Design Process 1

Joint winner, Australian Publishing Association Book Design Awards 2005: Best designed non-fiction book

This is one of my favourites. I took apart an old book (a copy of A Tale of Two Cities I bought for $5 at Goulds in Newtown, the best bookshop in Sydney if you don't have allergies or expect books to be shelved alphabetically), scanned in the various 'bits' and put them together, inside out. The splotchy bits are mould from the endpapers. I used white crayon to blank out bits of the text on the front, and coincidentally found a page that had "foulish" language on it ("rough hairy skins of beasts" etc). The pink is a fluro PMS, which doesn't reproduce well digitally but it's a visual assault when you open the cover. I made the title from letters cut out from a page of the book.

I was initially apprehensive about the ridiculously long title of this book, so decided to make a feature of the type; I wanted something industrial but still fun (it's a humorous autobiography). I made the letters playing with a paper stencil on the photocopier, then layering them in Photoshop. Below, you can see how the J and K are each made with about four layers.I started making the letters for another cover, but marketing didn't like it, so I played around with it a bit in a nonprofessional setting – see below, where I used it on the zine that accompanied an exhibition in 2005 called Girls Are Ugly When They Drink (the other photo is a shot of the exhibition space – most of the artwork was drawn on brown paper beer bags), before revisiting it when this cover came up.
Incidentally, it was supposed to be a two colour cover – the blue and purple are both metallic PMS colours (premixed inks, a bit like house paint, so you know you're getting an exact colour, commonly used for branding – think of the logo of a bank; the colour is always reproduced exactly the same ... Westpac red, Commonwealth yellow, ANZ blue). However, realise a metallic PMS is reflective, and therefore causes problems when the barcode is scanned (it reflects back into the scanner) so we had to add a third colour (a very dark blue) for the barcode. Oops. Now I know.

Eugene's Fetish

Self published book written and illustrated at university. Eugene loves books after they become an obsolete; people think he's perverted. I sold it in bookstores around Sydney and Melbourne for a while, but it was so difficult to invoice that I gave up and just give copies to people for their birthdays now.

Logos

Curiousworks is a non-profit collective of artists and educators who work on both community projects and their own creative multimedia and performance works. The little characters were developed to represent technology (little guy turning the cog) and art (the muse floating the 's' onto the logotype). A third character, representing community can be used in documents and on stationary (to prop things up):

Here's how they look on the website:

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An illustrated 'logo' for the Creativity and Uncertainty conference, run by the Centre for New Writing at the University of Technology, Sydney in October 2008. Thoth is the Egyptian God of Wisdom and creator of writing. Based on a statue from of Freud's collection, with Thoth in baboon form.

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Logo for three women (hence 3 birds) who write copy for arts and lifestyle publications. The birds separate from the logotype so they can be used individually, or moved around a letterhead/business cards.

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Logo for St Augustine Academy, a Sydney based fashion label (and the Bourke St shop front).

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A logotype for a Sydney production of Shakespeare's play, applied to all the promotional material.

Notes on Book Design Process 2

Cover for Nicki Greenberg's graphic novel adaptation of The Great Gatsby. It's a beautiful thing, and clearly a labour of love. Nicki is currently working on an adaptation of Hamlet (where else do you go after Gatsby?) The cameo-illustrations on the cover and 'photographs' on the back cover are Nicki's artwork, from the graphic novel. I made the frame by cutting and pasting elements from an art deco source book. The colour palette, which continues on the endpapers and chapter openers, is based on peacock feathers – something I thought appropriate to the social frivolity of Gatsby's infamous parties.The image above is the hardback version of the book. A paperback version is scheduled for release in 2009, here is the revised cover below:
The hardback has presence as an object – the paler colour palette suited that format, however, the paperback has a less solid presence on the shelf, so I shifted to a more vibrant palette, again based on peacock feathers. It also rhymes with the colour I used on the chapter heading pages inside. Nicki produced beautifully coloured vignettes for these pages (again, click for a larger image):

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The theme of the '07 UTS Writers' Anthology was 'what you do and don't want' – I thought what you don't want on a writers' anthology is to get the punctuation wrong. Many of the stories have an 'edginess' – the rusty scissors allude to this. The second (black&white) image is the spot UV varnish template – the cover is matt laminated, the varnish over the scissors is made with a halftone pattern to give the cover more texture. Amusingly, the printer contacted the editor with concern that the punctuation had "fallen out of the file". When does a printer ever check punctuation?

Sundays - upcoming exhibition at UTS

click on images for larger view

Sundays is an exhibition of three books, accompanied by annotated process work, that forms part of a practice-led PhD through the School of Design, University of Technology, Sydney. Zoë Sadokierski’s research examines a developing literary phenomenon: the integration of typo/graphic elements in prose fiction (novels with pictures in them). This is of interest to Visual Communication Design because it reveals writers working in a ‘designerly’ way: writers are borrowing techniques and strategies from the designer’s toolbox.
Sundays investigates how and why typo/graphic elements could be integrated into a short story. Using three different typo/graphic devices – experimental typography, drawing/diagrams and ephemera/photographs – three separate versions of the same story (written by Katherine Danks) are presented as individual books. Viewers are invited to sit and read each book separately, then reflect on their experience of reading the typographic, the illustrated and the photographic elements in each version.

The Red Shoe

Shortlisted for the 55th Annual Australian Publishing Association's Best Design Young Adult Fiction Award.

Full cover (gate-fold paperback) for young adult/adult novel. I used collage (turps release print, white pastel, pencil, pen and Photoshop) to create a slightly haunted look for this disturbing but beautiful story. Click on the image for a larger view. I was asked to design the first chapter to look distinct from the rest of the book – it was added after the manuscript had been edited, to introduce the Red Shoe story, which is read allowed in this introductory chapter and is an important allegory in the novel. I produced illustrations in the style of the fairytale books I had as a kid. I always liked the Red Shoe (despite the fact Karen gets her feet axed off at the end for coveting red shoes, a crime I'm absolutely guilty of):

I was also briefed to design a series of pages in the style of a 1950s newspaper, which are scattered through the book. The author supplied copies of the original newspaper articles, a few of them are collaged above on the endpapers (in red). I used them as visual reference and developed a template reminiscent of the layout. These news stories set the tone of the era and are generally grim and foreshadow the tragic climax.

Zines and bits and pieces

'What helper monkeys do on their day off', for Moonrocks, a zine my friends Emily and John were compiling. Below: These giraffes didn't make it into Sundays (see 'exhibitions' link) but I thought they deserved their moment in the sun. The 'greenery' in the top on is made from "Hell Bank Notes" – decorative joss paper you can buy in Chinatown which I think is the best ephemera I've ever found.

I produced these bird illustrations for a group exhibition, Creature Feature, at Canvas Gallery in Surry Hills (Sydney), 2006. Collectively, they are called The Bluebird of Happiness' Lesser Known Cousins

Above: illustration for online magazine The Pages.
TEN FONTS I HATE (A zine made for my book design students)

Fiction

Some covers I designed & illustrated (in-house and freelance) for Allen & Unwin.
Above, adult fiction, below young adult. Click on images to enlarge


Illustrations for Pagan's Daughter (cover pictured above centre ). Pen and ink with collage.

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Text design for Red Spikes (cover pictured above first image).

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Cover and endpapers for a young adult novel (Random House). I somehow ended up in the niche of young adult fiction, which doesn't bother me at all. Generally, kids/young adult covers allow greater creative freedom with typography and illustration. Young adult fiction is often quite dark. Teenagers are quite dark, wallowing in all their hormones, so I guess this is unsurprising.

I used the flourish (made by pasting together a couple of printer's ornaments from a typeface) from the front cover and endpapers as a chapter dinkus in typesetting. I love a deep text indent.
The book is narrated by Sophie (shown on the cover writing in her diary) so we decided to include an extra title page (after the book title) as if it was actually Sophie's diary. The cats and puffin hang around in the story.

Non Fiction

I know making books look like books has been done, but I still love it.

Click on image to enlarge