Exciting Happenings: New Job!

Very exciting news! I have a new job! :D And not a job working minimum wage in retail, exhausting myself on a daily basis with the constant 'I am better than this' running through my head, oh no. An actual real graduate job that I need my degree for! I'm so happy it's untrue, I've been despairing recently over my work/general life situation and now it's seems things are really looking up! It's a full time Junior graphic design position in London, which I'm so happy about because it's been my ambition to start my career in London. (It's the place to be, really, isn't it.)

is the company I am designing for, they are a small range of clothing companies such as Yumi and Uttam London. You've probably seen Yumi in House of Fraser.

Yumi clothing.

So my role is designing things like brochures and POS, and also helping out on pattern designs and illustrations on the clothes. Really exciting, and exactly the kind of thing I love doing. I start on monday!

So what does this mean for my personal and freelance illustration? Well, this is a full time job so I may not be able to undertake as many personal projects. However I am still (as always) available for commission for editorial and other work too. I will only ever take on what I know I can manage.

I will still of course continue blogging :) Maybe i'll invest in a netbook to make use of my commuting time. The joys of trains and tube at rush hour will now be mine! Ha.

So hopefully this is the beginning of a really great career for me. Sooo happy. There's hope for us recession graduates yet!

The Daily Ampersand Project: Day 6

Today's ampersand is Bauhaus 93. Doing this one was really fun today :)

All Daily Ampersands can be found if you click here.

I start a new (non design related...need cash) job tomorrow, so there may be less posts from me. I'll still keep this up though, in evenings etc. Yay for money!

New work: Climate Change Banner for ActionAid's Bollocks to Poverty Campaign

Last week I was working on this banner, which is to be displayed (hopefully, if approved) on ActionAid's website, for their 'Bollocks to Poverty' campaign.

Click for larger image.

The campaign is aimed at getting people motivated to actually do something to help end poverty; instead of just donating money and being a bit passive about the whole thing, it's encouraging people to get involved and get passionate about ending poverty, by putting on events and generally thinking outside the box. Here's a bit from the site:

You can do things a bit differently with Bollocks to Poverty. You don’t need to put on coffee mornings or cake sales, you can do what you love doing. Whatever you’re into you can support people fighting their way out of poverty. Shake a tin at your mates and they might chuck you a pound, but throw them a party and they’ll feel inspired to do much more.

Whether you put on a gig, jump out of a plane, pester your MP or volunteer at a festival, say Bollocks to Poverty and do it with ActionAid.

The site is well worth checking out, there's lots of things to do to get involved in the campaign, my favourite is this, "becoming a Bollocks to Poverty Tour Ambassador to come backstage at this summer's festivals, chat to some bands, write some blogs about it and then organise the mother of all Christmas parties for our amazing tour organisers". Noice.

The focus of the brief for this banner is their Climate Change campaign 'Food vs Dust'. It's basically highlighting the impact that climate change will have on the world's poorest - those who have actually contributed to climate change the least, but who will suffer most through floods, drought, cyclones, all of which will destroy homes and crops and leave to food shortages and ultimately starvation. So banners have been requested to highlight this and to act as a point of inspiration on the website to encourage people to find out more and hopefully get involved with trying to reduce climate change.

I mean, we all know about the damage that climate change is doing and people are beginning to do things to help these days (although my opinion is that its going to take more than a few canvas bags to save us), but people most often think about themselves, and the impact it will have on our children in the future - not about the damage that is happening NOW to people in poorer parts of the world. Just take a look at the photos that the Obama administration has revealed about how quickly polar ice caps are melting - even I didn't think it was happening this quickly.

I always try to get involved with issues to do with the environment, sustainability and living ethically within my work - they're things that I am passionate about and that I believe our industry (design as a whole) are capable of doing something about, even more so than the politicians. We're the ones who design the adverts and the packaging and everything to sell all the stuff - we are the ones who can change public thinking from mass consumerism/needing everything/more stuff right now to... whatever comes next. Post consumerism? Anti advertising? It's still a bit grey. 'Age of austerity' I think David Cameron called it. But it's the designer's who can influence people the most. Interesting really, that this recession has come around now... now that we're questioning what exactly we really need to be spending our money on, we can also start to question not just the impact it's having on our wallets but also on resources and the environment in general. I think most people are agreed that we haven't been living financially or environmentally sustainable for a very very long time. And now look what's happened.

So doing this banner was right up my street - the brief is open and people are encouraged to submit their own banners for the cause. I wanted to create something that had a positive overtone but still reflected the core issues - something to grab people in so they want to learn more, without being too overbearing/negative and more a call to get people motivated to change.

So hopefully it gets used on the site! I'll probably blog about it if it is does anyway.

I start my first day of my placement at The Open Consultancy tomorrow... wish me luck! Really looking forward to it. Early night though defo, had a rather mental birthday party last night so taking it easy today, so that I can be bright and breezy at 6am tomorrow. (Yeah, I have to get up at 6 every day, hello full time work... my student days really are over, aren't they :( can't really complain though, i'm so excited about this placement, i'll practically be leaping out of bed tomorrow).

Ciao for nowwww

Placement at The Open Consultancy! And other exciting things...

I've been a bit quiet in the blogging front these days... this is because I've been soo busy these past few weeks! Ever since New Blood, I haven't really stopped, due to a number of various things:

I moved into a new house with some friends and there was much room swappage, it took me about 2 weeks to finally unpack and get my room into MY room because I was back and forth to London and such places so much. Anyway I've finally got my posters up and I bought a new clock so that's nice.

I started a new job the week before New Blood, it's a monday to friday admin thing and work really takes the hours out of your day! Amazing, really. Actual employment. So all internet/creativity/posting/stuff takes place after 4pm now.

When I got back from New Blood (literally the day after) I was invited for an interview at The Open Consultancy, in Worcester. I had applied for a 2 month placement there and was soo excited to get an interview! We were set 2 briefs to complete and present at the group interview, which was about 4 days later. Argh. So every day after work I trekked over to Uni (it's dead quiet there in the studios now) and stayed until they kicked me out until I got the work done. That's when real life hits you really, none of this 12 week deadline nonsense with uni work, in the real world you've got 4 day deadlines AND a proper job to go to. Lot of red bull and chocolate was consumed. It was fun though, I love a bit of pressure, me.

One of the briefs was to create a 'thunkstick', which basically are like physical 'what are you thinking' Twitter style mailings. And they're awesome. I like anything like this, they're basically stickers on grey board with awesome shiny bits (mmm shiny) with a really simple, striking ideas that get sent out to people in the creative industries, as a sort of 'bumper sticker for your desk'. This was mine:
It came from the feeling that I keep getting recently that I'm glued to technology... either at work staring at a screen or at uni on Photoshop or at home trawling the internet or facebook or twitter or blogs or anything... or listening to my ipod, or texting my friends, and I just want to unplug! Go for a walk, read a book, draw something random, all things that I love doing and don't do enough. Do you ever feel like that? Technology is immense and helps me in all sorts of places but sometimes I feel like I'm turning into binary.

It went through many incarnations, but one of my favourite things that I didn't use was this:

Loved doing this though, to have a brief which is so open in many ways; 'design a thought' but so constricted in terms of sizing is a real treat. It was so nice to be actually designing something again, I really really need to get some new illustrations done, haven't done anything significant since finishing uni and it's making me restless.

So the interview went great and this monday I was offered the placement!! Which made me do a silly chair bouncy dance lol. I was so happy! I didn't blog about any of this until now because I didn't want to jinx it lol, but now that I actually got offered it I thought it was time to talk about what I've been doing! I can't wait, I've got just over a week left at my current job and then I start at Open on the 27th July. It's going to be so exciting working there. I will definitely update on it all when I start!

The weather is horrible today, I think it's going to be worse tomorrow. Time for a cider and a film I think.

Oh that reminds me, I saw Public Enemies last night, great film! The way it's shot is really interesting, feels almost documentary style, I dunno, the quality was strange. In a good way. And very lacking in music. Also in a good way. And full of Depp and Bale. In a very good way.

British Grand Prix 2009: Friday Practice

Well I had an awesome weekend, as you know, I'm a huge fan of Formula 1, so it was so amazing of my parents to take me to the Friday Practice sessions of the British Grand Prix at Silverstone last friday, 19th June. Had such a great day! It was a shame we couldn't afford the saturday qualifyers or the race on sunday, but I have 0 moneys (hooray for graduating in a recession) and my parents are in roughly the same boat as they've had paycuts and all that jazz. So we had to watch it on telly. Anyway; friday was still a treat and we got to see all the cars and drivers and a bit of GP2 and Formula Renault and Formula BMW too.

It was ridiculously loud.

You really don't appreciate it on the telly, but the roar of those engines are deafening. And they do this strange little pop when they gear shift which you don't hear on telly too.

My camera is 7mp and not great... so I was pleasantly surprised by the clarity of these:

No idea if that's Hammy or Kovaleinen; can't really see the colour of the helmet from here.

That's Button 'cos he's got the red bit on the top. This was in the last 10 minutes of the second practice session, Webber clipped a curb or something and his car just died. So he took a (slightly annoyed) walk through the crowd, which was nice. Can you see him? Next to the guy with the stupid Union Jack shorts.

The actual race on sunday was good and I'm glad Vettel won - he's such a happy guy, I can't begrudge him (even if he is German...) :P
Webber did well to get 2nd too, I really hope he wins soon, he definitely deserves it.
Tough luck to Button though, would have been so good if he won this weekend - wasn't to be though, 6th for him. And Hamilton continues his terrible run with another non-scoring place. I feel bad for him actually, he does try so hard. Maybe next year they'll give him a half decent car again.

Aside from that, I just chilled out at home with the 'rents, came back to Wolves last night and started my new admin job today! First day went well :)

Winners of 2009 Penguin Design Award announced!

I've been looking forward to this!

If you click here you can see all the winners and highly commended/shortlisted people. They were right, the standard of the work is so high, a lot of these covers are amazing.

Well done to Peter Adlington who won 1st Prize and the coveted 6 week placement at Penguin... I really like his design and it's definitely deserving. I'm tres jealous, lol.

Great colours, and very graphic, that's what I'd call it. So modern it looks retro, if that makes sense, and very ambiguous. Great title font too. Niiiice.

Here are my pick of my faves from the selection:

Edward Essex (what a great name) joint 3rd place:

I love the black and white of this, really striking and it feels very busy and manic, but in a good way - reflects the book really well. Great style.

Ben Cain - Highly Commended:

I'm a sucker for inventive use of type and this one pleases me greatly. Really simple execution but a strong idea, I bet this guy played around for hours getting this perfect. Love it.

Sara Mulvanny - Highly Commended:

Really nice illustrative style, good to see something not so 'designy'. Deers seem to have cropped up a lot in these covers (including my own - well we did read the book, you know) but this one seems to have used it the best. Nicely eery and really great type treatment, love those muted colours.

Sonia Poli - Shortlisted:

Again, hand rendered type always goes down well with me, especially massive type that take up nearly the whole cover. This just struck me as understated and simple, but really strong. Ah, there's the good ol' deers.

Sarah Prismall - Shortlisted:

This one is great, I love the geometric shapes and the pure white background, feels really clean and modern. I'd definitely pick this one up on a shelf. I'd perhaps have made the title larger though, or not centre aligned. That's just me though.

(All these images are taken off the Penguin Award website, copyright to their original designers.)

And of course you can see my entry here. It's so exciting finally having it up there, yay! :D

I'm going to the Awards evening next week, I can't wait! I will of course update here with how it goes.

I've been super busy recently so haven't been able to update as much, let alone draw anything. Silly me. I want to do a couple of new Editorials next week, I've found a few good articles so I'll make sure I do that. Also, I got offered a new job today which I'm so happy about, no more being on the dole for me! It's a good number of hours and it means I can finally like... buy stuff. Haha. Omg maybe I can finally replace my holey jeans :O

Music, Neon, and Small Objects.

Hello blog-type people. This week, I 'ave mostly been fer'ilising. I mean, er. I have mostly been working. It's been really great actually, startling how much I've learned about how design companies work, relationship with clients, how to actually layout a well designed page (sweeeet), and other stuff. Been bloody knackering though. Monday is my last day; I hand back over to the normal designer, then I get paid yeeeeha :D Hehe.

Today I went shopping with my dad, for his birthday present. It's scary how much I enjoy shopping, even if it is for my (oldish) dad - picking stuff out is cool ^.^ However, being the buying-stuff-aholic that I am, I couldn't resist these shoes in the Schuh sale:















How amazing are they?? (Yes those are my feet, they are pudgy, sshh.) They were half price, from £40 to £20. Duh. And they're uber high and actually pretty comfortable! I just love the neon style reflection on my floor :P I already have lots of neon accessories, although not much yellow, so may have to get a bag, or bright yellow top and then wear black jeans. Mwahahahaha. I want to wear them all the time! This nu-rave thing that's going on is the best trend EVER.

Moving on from that, I wanted to bring to people's attention some nice things I found, first of all is:
The Small Object
It's pretty explanatory once you visit it; a site selling lots of lovely little handmade artwork, and other things. These being my favourites:
The thumb war battle of 1596

Stickers. But cool ones.

And basically it's just a lovely little site. I like finding nice things like that.

Another thing I wanted to share was:
Creature Magazine
I found this via Allmightys.

"Creature-mag is an artist run online publication released quarterly. We receive work from artists, photographers, designers, illustrators, writers, poets and musicians from all over the world. The creature encourages free thought/speech and enjoys receiving pieces that both inspire and display an inventive application of the artists creativity.

We are a magazine of folk sensibilities, we aim to develop and sustain a talented community of creative people, to showcase the work of local and international artists and to facilitate both our own and others artistic development."

It's very pretty and now I aspire to having something accepted into it. But in the mean time, it's just a nice read :) Bookmark it, issues come every so often I believe.

The last thing, again found via Allmightys.com, is:
Music video for Grandaddy - Jed's other Poem.
It's entirely made on one of those old school 70's computers, and it's utterly beautiful. The song ain't half bad either!

I think the reason I like it so much is the visualisation of the lyrics, not just written out but, interacting with the song. I'm really into this myself - I may be alone but when I listen to songs I visualise the words and how they would be on paper, and the tones and melodies of the song affecting the way they're laid out - italicised, laid over, bla bla. Anyway, so quite often I'll just write out/design lyrics to how I think they'd look if music was visual. It's fun and so therapeutic. For example, I did these a few months ago now, it's the lyrics to Another Word for Desperate by Straylight Run:
























On the left is the original, typed up lyrics, overlapping etc. Click on it, have a look. The one on the right is the same, but messed up - I'm not going to say how 'cos I've never seen anyone else do this before, and it's miiiiiine ahahahahahaha. I'm sure you can figure it out anyway. It does strange things - stretches bits, flips lines over, all kinds of stuff. It's great. Hint, no photoshop involved, this entire thing is just done in word, well and a scanner/printer of course. Now I know how to use InDesign it can be done a lot easier now :) All the lyics belong to Straylight Run, of course.

So that's all for today. Have a nice weekend all :)

First day of Work!

So today was my first day at my new temporary job, at the local editorial design / publishing company I mentioned before. It was really good, actually quite fun, and considering it was a full day (9-5.30), it went quite quick. I was given a few tasks to do to get used to how they work, indesign, that kind of stuff. Like I had to design a couple of adverts for the back of one of their publications, and also just had a play around with the layout and design of one of the magazines they produce, get used to how it all works, as from monday I'll be covering for one of their designers and handling all that kind of stuff so I need to see how it all works really. But yeah, it was fun, I enjoy doing things like that.

Yesterday's drawanyway task was to produce a drawing in under 2 minutes, so I decided to draw my brother playing the keyboard:
I quite like it, considering how long it took :P

Everyone should take part in Draw Anyway, go here to find out more.

That's it for today. Yet again I didn't do this week's Illustration Friday topic. Sigh. I can't do it next week either, 'cos of me working and all, but the week after that I will do it. I keep having all these great ideas and not being able to do them! Sigh.

Must be some kind of rift in the space-time continuum.

I haven't posted in a while... been quite busy recently, nothing that exciting though. I said to myself I was going to post here once a day but that never happened. I will try though.

Anyway, you may have noticed I prettified my blog ^.^ I'm not overly keen on the header, so that might change soon, but it's ok for time being. Much better than the standard blogger text bit anyway. And I had lots of fun fiddling with colours last night so everything matches now. Hurrah!

There is a new t-shirt design competition open over at Allmightys.com. The theme for this one is 'Big City Life' and I'm going to try my hardest to win :) I've had a few ideas already, especially as one of my First Year projects was called 'The City', so I think I'll use the concept from that illustration. (Click to have a look, I posted it back in May.)

So here are a couple of my initial sketches for the competition:

This comes from that illustration that I did, but I'll do it in Illustrator (or try to), and use nice flat colours and stuff. Or...

There's this one, not as keen on this, it's supposed to be showing the road and the speeding lights of the cars at night. Meh.

I want to think up of some better ideas though, focussed on the actual 'life' of the city. And make them good. I have about 20 or so days though so I should be ok. I'm going to try to submit more than one design though because then I'll have a better chance won't I :)

So that's that. I also wanted to post about this great little site I came across via Illustration Friday, called Drawanyway.com. Check it out; the basic premise is that all of us, even the busiest, have a few minutes a day that can be used to draw. So there are daily, quick tasks set on there for anyone of any artistic ability to take part in. So far it's been fun :) I'm trying to use it because I know I need to draw more than I do, and the community feel means you can get some really great feedback on what you've done. It's only small so far but I've got a feeling it's really going to take off. For example, the other day the task was a self portrait, and the aim is to do most of these tasks in about 10-15 mins. Here's my attempt:
It's not that great; just shows how bad I've got at drawing now I don't do it every week. That's the good thing about uni, free life drawing classes :)

Tomorrow I start a temporary short job at a local design company, editorial and publication design, that kind of thing. Should be really good but I'm so nervous! I'm such a wuss. Everything frightens me. Life frightens me. It gets scarier as I get older too =/ But I shall post here tomorrow after my first day. Eep.

Last thing I wanted to say today was that a few weeks ago, while being bored and browsing on the internet, I typed in Rachel Lewis Illustration (for that is me, don'tcha know) into google, and guess what came up. Well, go look for yourself! I'm the 3rd entry down, but, and here is a massive shock, there is another illustrator called Rachel Lewis. An entry above me. Oh my god. Blasphemy. Bit unfortunate, eh. Out of all the careers :P Anyway, so I had a look on her website, www.rachellewisillustrator.com, and actually her stuff is quite good. I say actually as if i wasn't expecting it to be, no I just feel a bit put out, I hate when other people have my name! And my career. Boohoo. I like her editorial illustrations the most, like this one:
That's a bit small. Er, click on it.

And look, that's even the style I like!! Oh dear.

....Maybe it's me in the future. Or a rift in the space-time continuum. Waaa!!

Anyway, go look at her stuff. She is a better Rachel Lewis Illustrator than I am at the moment.

I hope people don't get confused. I'll have to change my name to Princess Conswale Bananahammock.

Update May 2009: I think she is now defunct... that website doesn't work anymore. So maybe I am the only Rachel Lewis of Illustration now? Who knows. You can see MY website over at the wonderful place of www.rachelsayshello.com... home of the real Rachel Lewis ;) hehe.

All
works in this post is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

Life Is Scary

Hurrah! Just submitted my design to Allmightys. Hope it gets accepted =/ Took me so long to sort out the files, geez. My laptop is supposed to be new and awesome but it's damn slow... It took 2 hours to run a defrag on it this morning, then I attempted to edit the files in Photoshop... my laptop hates Photoshop. It's so laggy, takes about 3 hours to do each step I swear.

I knew I should have bought a mac. Using Windows is like swimming in honey... you think it's all yummy and nice and then you're moving all slow and suddenly you can't breathe and oh dear you're dead. Sigh.

And it's a Vaio. One of those expensive ones. Should be awesome. But noooo.

/rant.

On a different note, I had my interview yesterday with the design company that I hoped to work for a bit in summer, I think I mentioned it earlier. That sentence had the worst structure ever. Anyway, so it was pretty scary, but I think it went OK. I'll be covering for one of the designers for a week, plus a few days either side. But, it's basically full on DTP design work. So I need to learn InDesign and Quark in about 3 weeks.

Argh.

Well basically they said if I can learn them I'll be far more useful to them, so I need to really. Problem is, even if I get a crack copy from somewhere just to play about with, as I mentioned above, my laptop will hate it. And my home computer is reeeaaally old and slow these days anyway. So I'm going back up to Wolves on friday to visit Russell, and University is still open so i'll just spend monday and tuesday going through tutorials from the internet. It shouldn't be that bad actually, I'm pretty good at picking up new software, and it's in the same family as Photoshop and Illustrator so it'll look semi familiar. Eep.

But yeah, even though the job is only for 8 days, i'll get quite a lot of money for it (which I need badly, boohoo) but even more important is the experience; it'll look great on my CV :) Yay.

Wow it's nearly 4:30. I was going to have an art day today but my stupid computer took up most of it =/ However I'm still going to have a crack at the new IF topic... it's Cars though =/ And that's the one thing that I can't draw. Hmmm. Should be fun :P

I'll post it today or tomorrow when it's done.

OH OH and the nice guys at Allmightys added me as a friend type person to their website... I even have my own little button, on the right side of their page. Which is jolly nice! Although this blog is kind of a working title... I need to make it pretty really. I got some nice comments from them too, so ta for that guys.

If my design gets accepted, EVERYONE has to vote for me. I shall make it law.

The Robinson's adverts

Has anyone seen these? They're so cute! I just love the style :D

You can watch one here

^.^

Here's some press ads too:


Got them all from here.
Yay :)

I really want to know who did them. I think the advertising company was called BBH, but some designer or illustrator has got to have created the whole thing.

Answers on a postcard please :)

EDIT - OK I just found him ^.^ He's called Adrian Johnson and his stuff is AWESOME. I love it way too much. Look:

Hehe. His website is Www.AdrianJohnson.org.uk. Everybody go there!
Think I may even add him to my inspiration list. Get me eh.

On another note, I just heard today that I've got a 2 week paid work experience placement at a local design company. They are called impact! and I'm quite excited :) I was hoping for a whole summer placement but I suppose this is better than nothing! And I can stay on longer if I want, just won't get paid. Should be interesting though.
I have to go there next tuesday to show some of my work... but I need to choose pieces that have an editorial design slant... hmmm. Might be quite hard =/ Scary.