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?