Are you taking a show to a festival this year? Need a poster design for your posters, flyers and socials? I can help.
Festivals are crowded markets so it's important to get a design that communicates quickly and looks professional. It's often the first thing a potential audience member will see, and the reaction you need is "That looks good" not "What is it?". Get in touch.
Good posters are crucial part of persuading potential audience members to come and see your show.
Poster design for events, campaigns and promotions. We work a lot with the live events industry where design needs to be high impact. We provide posters alongside branding and social media packages.
Motion Graphics, Design & Illustration. I've connected with some amazing new clients this year and collaborated on some wonderful projects.
There have been a few long hours and late nights, but I can feel creative boundaries being pushed in the finished work going out the door (FYI, It makes an excited 'whooshing' sound).
Last 2 years I've been super focused. To step up, be seen, and keep it fresh. At the beginning of the year I rebranded, changing 'John Cooper Design' into Rocket Steps, Creative Studio ( reckon that's where the 'whooshing' sound came from).
It's helped me clarify my ethos. I don't outsource, I work directly with clients and the best ideas win.
I don't think I'd have had the confidence 10 years ago to be as bold with ideas as I am now. Also, I'm experienced enough to be humble when the client's idea is great, and I just need to execute it with style.
I work directly with clients end-to-end. From ideas sessions to final delivery, to get the most from their budget and suggest ways to make the most of what they need.
Collaboration
I'm used by agencies and events companies for illustration and live art, when my style suits their needs. Being a solo studio means I can be super flexible on times, places and deadlines.
Looking to hire a motion graphics designer?
You can book me by the day or by the project. I can help you pin down a brief (a description of the work you need doing) and suggestions the best ways to tell your story and get your message across.
Need to hire an illustrator?
You can book me by the hour or the day. Never used an illustrator before, or have questions that's fine too. Whether you have a clear idea of what you want, or would you benefit from a handful of quick sketches to get the ball rolling.
WordPress Tips to save you time.
Have I mentioned I'm a complete nerd for WordPress? I've been working with it for over 10 years now, building sites for businesses and keeping track of the cool things you can do to keep your website ahead of the curve.
Other builders have arrived like Webflow and Squarespace (which seems to sponsor every Youtube video I watch!) but WordPress still surprises me with its flexibility and adaptation.
At the moment I'm looking at the trend of storytelling or 'scrolly-telling' pages, that use video and animation to engage as the user scrolls down the page. No need to make a new website, as WordPress templates can handle this comfortably. Anyway, this blog isn't intended as a humblebrag, just an update and knowledge share.
Here are 4 ways to make the best use of WordPress on your website;
1. Check you're using Google Analytics 4.
Important if you're keeping track of visitors and traffic on your website. At the end of July 2023 google stopped tracking traffic on websites that use early versions of Google Analytics. If you're tracking your stats, you should upgrade.
The good news is there's a plug-in called Site Kit which pulls Google stats directly into WordPress, making it easier to see traffic and visitor numbers.
2. Use patterns to make your page design more engaging.
WordPress 6 has a tool called Patterns. It's not that new, but it's now much easier to use. Selecting a pattern gives you a pre-made design block. Just change the text and images as you need to make your pages more visually interesting.
3. Manage social media posts from your website.
If you've used an app like Hootsuite you'll know it's a great time saver for posting to your social media channels with one click. You can also do this through your website with jetpack integrations. Connecting your social media accounts means that when you publish s new blog, it'll automatically share to your socials.
4. Save time and connect similar blogs with the query loop.
You may have a 'related news' feature on your website. A block at the bottom of the page that pulls in links to other blogs. Well, now you can add this feature anywhere on a page, automatically creating links to other blogs without having to search or create manual links.
The 'query loop' block uses categories and tags and is a great way to guide users to older blogs they might have missed. It's my favourite recent feature.
I try to keep my WordPress blogs as easy to digest as possible, avoiding as jargon and technical terms. After all, WordPress was designed to be used by non-technical users. If you're looking to upgrade your site, freshen it up with a new design, or get a new one from scratch, I can help. Your website should be easy and - dare I say it- fun to use, so you don't have to worry about technical issues, and can focus on creating good (human) content.
You've probably seen an explainer video. Traditionally it starts with someone talking, and then a hand appears and starts drawing what's being talked about, speedily making pictures to illustrate the subject. I've done a few of those, but they don't always need to look like that, do they?
I think it's just in the terminology, perhaps more folk have heard of the word 'explainer video' than say 'motion graphics' or 'storytelling video'. There are loads of ways of telling a story in a video, and explainer style is just one.
Where will it appear?
He's an example I did recently for NHS North West. You'll notice no sound or voiceover in this version. That's because in the initial meeting, we looked at what the team needed the video for, and where it would be seen. From there I could Then plan the best formats, so they got maximum value from the result.
Getting maximum value from the explainer video format
There were separate illustrations for print, a PowerPoint slideshow someone could talk over to an audience, and a version with text overlayered, to play out on a big screen in a conference room to engage an audience before an event began.
The end goal in mind
Having the end goal in mind helped the format. Identifying where and how the content would appear, meant I could lean into detail with the illustrations to engage the audience in my signature style. A great project to work on and cheers to the team for giving me creative freedom on it.
Question: Come on then Turbine fella, how would you describe an explainer video?
Woof, an explainer video is a short and engaging video that explains a complex or tricky-to-understand subject in a simple and accessible way. It can be created using different styles such as hand-drawn animation or clean and technical data animation.
What could I use it for?
They can be used for a variety of purposes. They are great for simplifying complex ideas, introducing a new product or service, showcasing a brand or company, educating customers or employees, and promoting a cause or idea.
How long should an explainer video be?
the ideal length of an explainer video depends on the complexity of the subject matter and the attention span of your target audience. Generally, most explainer videos range from 60 to 90 seconds. This is because attention spans are short, and you want to get your message across quickly and effectively. However, if the subject matter is more complex, the video can be longer, up to 2-3 minutes.
Do you know what Phononics are? Can you draw sound?
Here's some new work I did for Professor Will J. Parnell for the International Phononics conference this year. As a creative, I love learning new things when I make animations and visuals - and this is a brilliant challenge.
"Phononic materials are engineered media that can manipulate waves propagating through them due to their synthetic and periodic architecture" Got that? My rough understanding is how soundwaves move through materials, and how soundproofing works.
Illustrating sound waves was pretty straightforward, with waveforms. Soundproofing materials was trickier. I looked at maths-based art (as that formed the exciting logo) with all its geometry, tesselation and symmetry, and the two parts came together nicely to carry the theme of the event. But where does the sound come from? These are the questions, and that's when the train the visual whoosh came in at the beginning.
Helping the NHS Cheshire tell positive stories of the experience of autistic people for their Autism Awareness Strategy.
The NHS Cheshire & Wirral are launching their new autism awareness strategy and were looking for someone to help promote it with some animation. Hello. What was so cool about this project, is how open to ideas they were when I suggested using characters to tell a 'day in the life' story. We are all keen to get it right and make it really engaging. So less data and more story. It became a really positive collaborative process.
The Characters Taking feedback from a group, the team tested a few types of characters, from basic shapes to talking animals and, settled on people with easy-to-read expressions. Robbie, who brought me into the project had seen my pandemic comic strip, Distance, and was keen to use that style to render the characters, giving the animation (motion graphics to be fair) a comic strip feel to tell the story, some of which was taken from his own life experience.
The Script
The script was created collaboratively. I wrote up a first draft, a jumping-off point to work from. The team then added, edited and in our online meeting gave me plenty of notes to create a more well-rounded, story while keeping a light-hearted tone. If you want funny stories about real life - crikey, the folks in the NHS have loads of them!
The Recording
I did a first run, and then Robbie suggested recording people with lived experience. This made perfect sense, and as we weren't budgeting for full lip-synched animation and made the piece a lot more authentic.
Summary
In discussion with the NHS team, we looked at details like the use of colour, sound and clear facial expressions of the characters of Andy and his pal Seema. Big thanks to Maddy, Sharon, Lesley, Robbie and Mahesh for getting me in to be their art director, and creator of this video animation.
Do you have a story to tell? Not sure how to get started with it or just need some ideas? Get in touch to see how I can help bring it to life.
Unearthodox ways to get a new website
A website can be many things. Unearthodox is an organisation dedicated to research, change and getting their word out. Their website is a marketing and information resource to share their pioneering work.
My role was taking the concept designs made by Radley Yelder and building the site in WordPress. There were plenty of moving parts in getting the 250+ page website up and running, and WP scaled brilliantly to the task.
What do you use your website for, and what do you need it to do?
Getting down to the nitty gritty, the Unearthodox website had great design, and engaging case studies. The team wanted to be able to add content easily, and categorise projects so they could keep track of the diversity of their output. I added interactivity and motion to create a really modern website.
In terms of getting the word out, the new Unearthodox website uses Google Analytics 4, and pulls the statistics directly into the site, so no need to go to the rather complex looking Google control panel to see what visitors are clicking on, it's all there to see in the website dashboard. This is really helpful see whats popular and help your content strategy.
I'm biased as a website designer, but a website will give you a level of control that social media can't. With your website sitting on your own bit of internet 'land', you can do whatever you want with it and choose how you present yourself to audiences and search engines.
Why not just use social media?
Sure, social media is easy to use and services are often free, but you'll never own the content you post. Social media can change how they function too (I'm looking at you twitter) which can have a knock-on effect of how you're seen. The key difference is SEARCH. On social media, you're just one of the thousands of companies being catered for, so how you appear in searches can be limited.
Is WordPress any good?
In my opinion, it's the best tool out there. Certainly, this 250+ page website would be impractical with other off-the-shelf website builders. Of course, not every website starts at 250 pages, and WP's scalability is one of its great assets. Need a 10-page website? WordPress will do it, and will still be there in 5 years as you grow to 50 or 100 pages (the area where other builders become more cumbersome).
I still see WordPress websites that are mishandled, and I think that's just WP becoming a victim of it's own popularity. WordPress is open source. That's great for progression and innovation, but means it can fall prey to intrusive plugins and page builders. Getting a skilled WordPress developer is key to a good WordPress website.
It's been a busy year and a lovely way to round it out live drawing the national firefighters' conference, back again for the second year.
Graphic recording, capturing talks given by the guests there was a lot to digest. A lot of focus was on well-being and health, and I'm pretty sure the firefighting service isn't alone in having this as a priority to discuss. It was their 25th year and they had a lot to celebrate. My favourite talk was on sleep by Dr Sophie Bostock, as after 2 days of drawing solid I was quite ready for a power nap!
Graphic recording, live scribing, live art, whatever name it is given here are some more samples of artwork created at live events.
Here are a few excerpts from a large-scale wall art illustration I did recently. The final pieces are very big and I can't show you the whole thing, but this gives you a flavour of the final pieces.
These pieces are super detailed illustrations, not quite Where's Wally level wall artwork, but they did have to convey a lot of information and be engaging enough to stand the test of time if people were going to be seeing the work every day. It was a great project to work on and also time intensive!
Turning messages into illustration
The process of creating illustration work like this involved taking a lot of text content and then boiling it down. Turning those messages into visuals that were inspiring. Generating a lot of ideas and being imaginative with the messages was key to creating a good piece of wall art.
The whole project was done digitally, although it could have easily been done live on the wall. First off I created a series of sketches to cover each topic then needed depicting, and then these were arranged onto a larger canvas to find a good composition that would be narrative (tell a story), and not be confusing.
The sketches were drawn up in clip studio and converted into vector graphics from there. Vector conversion has come on a long way in recent years to convert pixel art into vectors, a format that can scale to any size. However, it's not perfect and still has a problem with very detailed artwork becoming muddy. Some of the original sketches had to be output at very high resolutions in order to convert without losing detail. The final pieces were tweaked by hand to smooth out any rough edges and then delivered to a very happy client.
A bespoke website for news articles and opinion pieces
Card Game Illustration
Over the last few months, I've collaborated with Prof Martin Fitgerald at the University of Bradford, creating illustrations for a card game titled' 'Capturing the Sun'.
Mock-up of box design
The game is designed to help with cognitive restructuring (a term used in CBT) and is aimed at people with long-term psychiatric conditions. Based on the Mouri folk tale of Maui, the Polynesian Demi-god who captures the sun with powerful ropes to make the day last longer. As described in the games manual;
"This game is designed to help people who experience serious mental illness to make their own powerful ropes so they can capture the skills, knowledge and understandings required for recovery, so they too, can live in the light."
It's been a fascinating project to work on as an illustrator, and I've always wanted to illustrate games.
Martin's a fan of monochrome linocut illustration and liked my work, so I leaned into that for these card game illustrations.
Deck cards depicted the terms used in cognitive restructuring, the challenge was then finding the right visual metaphor to describe the term. Some were straightforward, such as 'fortune telling' being depicted by a crystal ball.
Others needed more revisions to get right. We were exploring visual ideas that aren't too prescriptive - or lead to incorrectly interpreting the meaning. In the case of 'Generalizations', the concept sketch began as a fog cloud, which was fine but not very, then an image of different hats, labelled 'hats' to signify the general. This had the opposite effect, being visually interesting but a little confusing for the term it was trying to encapsulate. We settled on a signpost with vague directions like 'here' and 'there', which was a good balance of communication design.
The question cards needed faces. Heads of people from a diversity of backgrounds and ethnicities. As each card poses a dilemma, these folks expressions should be deep in thought, pondering their situation. In early drafts it was easy to push a little too far, drawing folks who looked very stressed out, so expressions were pulled back a little for a more subtle look. A raised eyebrow here or slight pout there was enough to capture what was needed without the character leaning into what could be perceived as negative.
The game also needed a box cover and logo. The logo was based on Mau the sun god and the general feel was simple, using the clarity and monochrome lino-cut aesthetic to give the game it's style. Here's a mock-up of the final cover design of the sun god.
Do you need illustration or graphic design for your next project or want creative input to help put your ideas in motion?
Early sketches, exploring ideas for the box and cards.
I've just completed work on the Childrens University of Manchester learning platform. As a freelance graphic designer, I was first brought in to work on these projects they were created in Flash around 12 years ago. Today, in what's now the final iteration of the website, all the content has been converted into either HTML5 or PDF. The goal has been to take the old, still valuable, learning content and convert it into a (hopefully) future-proof format, so it can live long and prosper.
Some of the original modules were designed by myself, and other older sections by other designers, with all content being created and written by students and staff at the university.
The HTMLs sections didn't need any attention and still work fine.
Making PDF's from old Flash files
The first task was 'harvesting' the original content from old flash files. For content I created I could go back to my source files. With designs not created by myself, I had to be a little more resourceful with only access to SWF files. With flash now deactivated on all web browsers, I used Adobe debugging tool to open the SWF's, and experimented with a few different ways to extract the graphics. From importing the SWFs into an old version of Flash to the rudimentary method of using a high res 2k monitor to screen grab and isolate elements, reduced them, clean up, and even re-traced back into vectors from pixels. This was time-consuming but also offered good results.
Harvesting the text was another challenge. In some cases I got lucky and text from the flash file was being loaded externally from an XML file. The worst case was screen-grabbing text and running it through an OCR program (optical character recognition). This converted graphics into text which then needed proofing to check for things like letter 'o's not showing up as zeros. Again time-consuming but worthwhile.
Once all the content was gathered the new design work could begin. Creating layouts and new graphics where needed to glue together the continuity, or make clear elements that were previously motion graphics.
I was given the flexibility to come up with some new cover images. It's been a bit like being a design archaeologist, unearthing the past. The staff at the university were really pleased with the results and I'd like to think if you came to the website fresh today, You'd just see the learning content, which I hope will be evergreen.
John is a freelance graphic designer based in Manchester with clients around the world. If you have a project or need design advice, contact him here;
Website Design & WordPress 6
In the last few years, WordPress has gone from strength to strength. I last did a video on WordPress when version five had launched, and now WordPress has 6 even more layout features, making it even more powerful as a website designer's editor of choice.
While new features like page templates and new layout blocks mean that it's not as easy to 'pick up and go' as it used to be, the premise of WordPress is still core - putting the power of editing into the hands of non-technical uses so they can get on with adding content to their websites without worrying how to do it.
The ability to edit headers and footers separately, and change templates and colour schemes on the fly are very helpful and I hope in time will make cumbersome page builders a thing of the past.
As a website designer helping my clients get the best out of their websites and I recommend WordPress for websites.
John Cooper is a website designer and developer working directly with Global clients. Nothing is outsourced. John designs WordPress websites for small and medium businesses around the world since 2008.
Contact John today for a website quote.
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