New Work: Leith Festival Fundraiser Poster Designs

Never underestimate the power of Twitter. I would never have got involved with this if I hadn't seen the RT on my feed. Leith Festival (just outside of Edinburgh) needed a poster doing for their fundraiser, which sounds like it'll be great - Leith's Found Fashions:

'The Evening will showcase outfits designed by local designers and outfits created in association with local charity shops!

There will be Live music from Leith's Very own Obehi: www.obehimusic.com
www.facebook.com/obehionline

There will also be an opportunity for you to purchase the fashions on show and fashions that were not displayed on the catwalk!'

So I sent them a few rough drafts and they chose mine for the final designs! Nice.

I wanted to give the designs a real vintage feel, so used found imagery coupled with classic fonts (Gill Sans and Futura to name a few) and am really happy with the outcome. The first is a much more fun, kitsch tongue in cheek look & feel, with a cute curly typeface called 'Kushtie' which I love. The second is an old Vogue Pattern Design amended to include all the information and to show off the idea of Vintage Fashion.

It was a pleasure to be part of this and I hope they do well to promote the fundraiser. Click here for the facebook group which has details of the event. If you're anywhere near Leith (I am not... lol) then do go and take part!

What do you think?

I am of course available for future design and illustration commissions :)

New Work: 'I Fear The Distraction' Art & Fear Submission

This piece of work was created last week specifically for a submission for Underground Art School's Magazine. Issue 5's theme is Art & Fear and they wanted a focus on hand-drawn typography for this issue. "The two topics seem to go hand in hand. Create, draw, or design us your favorite quotes, lyrics, and positive affirmations that inspire you to move past the fear toward creativity. What are your creative fears? What worries you?"

This is an entirely hand-rendered piece, nothing done in Photoshop except tweak the contrast a bit. It is all rendered in HB and 4B pencil, with a hand drawn version of Adobe Caslon Pro, including ligatures.

I've just discovered ligatures and what they're actually for. I thought they were just typographic decoration. Designers showing off. Not so. "Ligatures usually replace consecutive characters sharing common components and are part of a more general class of glyphs called "contextual forms" where the specific shape of a letter depends on context such as surrounding letters or proximity to the end of a line." So there. And of course, the ampersand is a ligature; of et. Now everything in the world makes sense. There are all sorts of rules too, here's an article that looks at 18th Century ligatures, for all you history people.

Being that I never had any formal typography learnin's during Uni, I didn't know any of this. I am intrigued.

The quote is something I made up, addressing the worries that a lot of freelance artists/designers have when starting up; I need a 'real job' to tide me over before I start making a lot of money from what I do, but I don't want this job to take up so much of my time that I can't create/design when I want to. It's a common thing. I feel it a lot. It's easy to say, oh just do your illustration in the evening/night, but I don't want to do the thing I love at night. It's draining and tiring and above all, I want to spend my working time working on things that I love doing, not in a shop. Etc. The intended slight illegibility of the piece is supposed to evoke the frustration that this situation causes.

The whole idea was inspired by an interview I read in the current issue of Grafik magazine, with Project Projects, where they discuss a similar thing.

I'd quite like to turn it into a screenprint eventually. That'd look ace I reckon. Just need to get near to a screenprinting bed. I can't believe I lost my uni ID - can't use the facilities now :( Major lame.

I hope it makes it into the Issue anyway, I'm pleased with how it turned out; it was a labour of love and took a while, but I love doing hand drawn type and it was a departure from a lot of my work.

Retro is definitely the way forward!

Just seen this on my RSS feed from Swissmiss - iPod cassette tape holder! So awesome.



Readers of my blog will know that I love a bit of cassette-ness, and I recently did an illustration project based on the idea of using retro/vintage imagery to encourage people to hold on to their mobile phones instead of upgrading. One of the posters is below, I love drawing cassettes, that project was ace. Retro is definitely the way forward!

Now I really want to fish out my old cassettes and do this for my iPod. It won't fit though, I have a ig ol' 80gb video ne, not a nano. Aw.

New stuff, awesome happenings, etc

I've been working on my sustainability/mobile phone project a lot recently, it's really coming along. I'm doing a mini branding/advertising campaign, as if it were for the charity Together, which helps people fight climate change. A made up brief but I'm basing it around them because I like what they do. The posters I'm doing are being made as if they'll be displayed in the London Underground; 6 escalator posters that you see as you go down into the tube, giving you first exposure to the campaign and intriguing people with the imagery. A big 16 sheet poster across the tracks on the platform that ties all the visual links together and encompasses what the campaign is about, and then a tube car poster with more text on to explain exactly what the campaign is and what you can do about it. So a coherent campaign that you are exposed to as you travel on the underground.

The campaign is to encourage 16-25 year olds to consider whether they really need to upgrade their phone to the latest model, for the sake of the environment. Using the device of retro/vintage is cool, keep your old phone if it still works, etc etc.

So far I'm working on the escalator posters, these are 3 that are nearly done:




There's going to be 3 more, imagine them in a series as you go down the escalator. No thieving! :)

Other exciting stuff:

After the disappointment of not being accepted into the RCA for my masters ('twas a long shot I know), I found out yesterday that I have an interview at St Martins! Which I'm so pleased about because I really want to go there. The course looks so great. So that's exciting/tres scary.

Also, I now have a website! Well, I bought a name. www.rachelsayshello.com There's nothing on it yet. But there will be! It shall be immense. Or something. That's my May project; once I've handed in all my Uni work, I'm building that, in time for the Degree shows. I really like the address, it's going to fit well with the branding ideas I'm coming up with for myself.

I'm submitting my Penguin Design Award entry this week; I'll be posting the final image on here this weekend hopefully. It's driving me crazy though, all these minute little details that I still can't get quite right. But it's 99.9% done.

Um, I think that's it right now. Oh we had a lecture this morning by the guys at Nolan|Ross (ooo I figured out how to do the | thing!) who are a cool little multi-talented design company. They do loads of stuff, have a look. It was nice to see past students doing well for themselves, gives me hope! :)

Retro is the way forward!

I've decided not to post my work in progress for the Penguin Design Award competition. Obvious reasons really. I'll post the finished version when it's sent off and entered :)

In other news, I have been working on my sustainability posters, in particular the mobile phone one - persuading people not to upgrade their phone when it works perfectly well, for the sake of the environmental damage that new phones cause during manufacture.

I'm going for a retro feel here, the idea that vintage/retro is cool and so old phones are cool too. Just been doing some drawing and some initial ideas and....

Cassettes! Space invaders! Old Nokias! All the best things ever. I have discovered that I love drawing cassette tapes ^.^

So this is the starting point. Imagine pixellated text, retro colours... good times. I'll update as I progress, I have a good feeling about this project :)