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.