Crikey, this blog is really old now - over 5 years - and some of the websites mentioned no longer work, or change changed. Why not head over to this more recent blog all about Futureproofing graphic design
High time for a Design Portfolio update of all things web, print and illustration.
It's been a while since I last updated the portfolio, and I've been accused of not blowing my own trumpet on the design front. Time to get to grips with what I've learned about the new Jetpack galleries for WordPress to display all the new stuff I've been working on. With lots of new illustrations and website work to add, it's hard sometimes for me to know which items to put up first. My marketing head says the big clients come first. To show the size of the larger companies I work with, but my designer's heart always looks to the most creative project. Then again, these can be one in the same.
Similar to illustration. When working a range of styles, knowing which image to put in front of the other can be something I could easily overthink. Compere the recent Comedy Marathon poster with my own black and white book illustrations. It's style versus speed, depending on the need. Good than that with grid galleries and optimised images, I can show all the newer, and some more established portfolio pieces all at once.
My clients are awesome, but then some projects are just a pleasure to do. Madison Cooper (no relation) has been doing yoga since she was a child, and trained at a Yoga school in India to gain her teaching qualification so she could return to Manchester and set up her own business teaching 'Hatha-Vinyasa flow'. With it's growing popularity there are many yoga classes across the city, so it was important to find a style that was unique to her and communicated the kind of classes she runs. Illustration and delicate choice of colours helped here to get a logo design & brand in a gentle yet powerful way. I've even taken up yoga myself in the last year, and can do a headstand!
Christmas Card art
Get Your Festive Greeting in First and show 'em your not a Scrooge at Christmas.
Now is a good time to start thinking about a Christmas mail out. Getting your own piece of artwork is the best way to show you care at Christmas, it also raises your profile and fosters good relationships, professionally and personally.
You could use Moonpigeon or Funky-pig-templates.com for your Christmas card, but even then you would only get as close to what you want as the template wizard allow.
For more samples and a quote, contact Rocket Steps and get your cards in before your friends do.
Sitting in my office doing some illustration I had a flashback to my first 'real' job as a designer back in the late nineties. There were two bosses, they were chalk and cheese. Where one saw creativity the other saw only hard-to-define labour costs.
I was working on graphics for an 'online shop' selling the new DVD format and did some Sci-fi inspired illustrations, so the website would have some nice original content. Boss #2 saw that I had a sketch pad and pencil drawing out ideas. He stopped me and got me doing something else, can't quite remember...scanning dvd covers or something like that. The point was he didn't like what I was doing.
I'll grant you this was in Sunderland in an office next to a warehouse in 1998, but I was employed as a designer for his emerging website company and he couldn't bring himself to accept what I was doing was work. He liked to see the the finished work and show it off, but couldn't deal with seeing the creative process, certainly I felt I had to hide the early stages of a project from him. Eventually I got frustrated and left.
Now I've the benefit of hindsight. Being self-employed I have to balance budgets between the creativity and the more practical leg-work, or more specifically hand-work, and can guess that concept work will take that little bit longer than I think it will, so I budget based on individual projects. Boss #2 came from a different background to me, if a cost needed cutting the first thing to go would be the 'airy-fairy nonsense' of drawing pictures - the 'hand-work' needs doing. However that needs guidance, and as I'm doing both it's important to find a good balance between the two, so at the end there not just something to see, but something to show off.
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