10 YEARS

This week my company BOLTgraphics has turned 10. On 02-02-2000 I started up my little circus and it's been chugging along ever since. And, as ones does at these occasions, I got a little bit nostalgic...
Here are all the different logos I've used over the years.

2000:


2002 (a t-shirt design really):


2004:


2007:


2009:


Not all of these were extensively used and none have really been decommissioned, but I have to say, looking at these, I should design a few new ones.

hmmm sugar

Through the power of the world wide interwebs, I have over the years worked with and befriended quite a few people. People I have never met in the real world. One of these friends is Jeff Andrews who interviewed me last year on his Design Inspiration blog.
Then later that same year (it was 2009, I remember it well...) Jeff needed a new logo for one of his other blogs; Sugar Frosted Goodness. He was thinking of something typographic and asked me to have look at it.

So sketching ensued...


After taking a look at these sketches I decided none of these really captured the gooey sugary sweetness the name of the blog demanded. So I decided to go for a more gloopy feel, but I still wanted to keep a strong all be it playful character shape.
Also Jeff had mentioned he would like to see some typographic interwoven..ess, so I did this sketch:


Jeff liked it. I didn't quite yet, but after amending the last S on Goodness and some other little things...


And then it was ready for digitization. And after a bunch of nitpicking and vector-fidgeting this is the end result:


Jeff's blogs:
Sugar Frosted Goodness
Design Inspiration
Adventures in Blogging

New site

I know it hasn't been that long ago that I announced I had a new site up... well forget that one and go check out my latest new site!
It's all clean and breezy, with nice big images of my work. I haven't put all my work on there yet, but I will in the coming weeks.
Go take a peek at the thing and let me know what you think. Thanks.

One trick pony

A while back I did a series of posters for Bullet Creative in London in an old Victorian "circus-sideshow" typographic style. Which, I have to admit, is something I like doing and apparently it shows as I was asked to repeat the exercise for the latest issue of "Creatie". It's a magazine geared towards the Dutch advertising industry and has a guest editor every month, who determins the theme of the issue. This time it was Sicco Beerda of Euro RSCG and the theme had everything to do with "reality" or "realism" and at the same time "fakeness" and "untruth" I guess.
Anyway on that theme I was asked to start sketching for an article which wasn't quite finished yet. The editor came up with the idea of referencing well-known commercials that played with the idea of "real" and "not real".
They were Cadbury's Drumming Gorilla, Evian's Skating Babies and I put in Axe's (or Lynx for some parts of the world) Chocolate Man.



Right after I presented the sketch, the final article came through and it didn't fit the sketch (or vice versa). The article focused a lot more on certain people who influenced opinion. So the editor decided to keep the style but change the characters, replacing them with the people mentioned in the article.
I didn't mind too much because it gave me a chance to do some portraits. Although I was kind of looking forward to putting ink on that gorilla...

These are the (somewhat dirty) inks of the portraits:


And the finished product:


Click for a better look...

STATE-X NEW FORMS

Yeah yeah I know, it's been too long since I last posted something... but here it is now, so quit your yapping.

The beautiful city of The Hague is quickly turning into one of the more cultural cities in the Netherlands as well. One of the ways by which it is doing this is through a festival called State-X New Forms. It's a festival focussing on alternative electronic and underground music and art... Or as they put it themselves "Festival for avant-rock, cutting-edge electronics and nu-art".

They asked me to design and art-direct the whole publicity side of this year's event. As you might remember I showed the proposals for the style that they didn't go for earlier this year (click here or just scroll down... yeah again I'm sorry I haven't been posting jeeees!!).
Here's what they liked better:

Flyers (collect all 4!!):


Posters:


All kinds:


The whole thing goes down on the 11th and 12th of December. There's some more stuff I did for this project but I can't really show that since it's not been made public yet.

If you're interested in going, here's the website (the design for which I was not responsible).

Thanks for your patience...

Typosters

This is a series of posters I made under commission of the London based Bullet Creative for the Cool Sounds from the Frozen Arctic event organized by Cape Farewell and the Eden Project as part of the 2009 Eden Sessions.
It was a nice job since the kids at Bullet basically let me do 'my thing' and luckily for me the client really liked it.

Because of a somewhat limited budget I wasn't able to custom-drawn all the type, but I did do the 'Shlomo'. For the "Jarvis Cocker" I made use of the House Industries, Photolettering Inc. online application of which I am lucky enough to be a beta tester.

All of these were used, apart from the one with Jarvis Cocker. He had to drop out of the line-up for reason I'm not aware of.

Hope you like.

Digging the crates

Over the years I have designed a ton of T-shirts, which was fun, but hardly lucrative. The one thing I still get a bit of a kick out of though, is bumping into people wearing them every so often. This usually happens at punk-rock or hardcore gigs as the vast majority of those shirts were commissioned by Mark Beemer.... hang on there's logic to that.
Mark being a veteran photographer of the hardcore and punk-scene also runs the Syrentha Savio Endowment, a non-profit organization that provides financial assistance to underprivileged women who cannot afford the expense of fighting breast cancer.
He raises money by, among other things, sell limited edition t-shirts of well-known hardcore- punk- and alternative-bands who make their name available free of charge (I assume). And these needed to be designed. So that's where I came in.

Not all of these were used in the end, but I like these enough to post them (obviously). Click the pics for a closer look.

All American Rejects (never used).


Antiflag (never used)


Between the Buried and Me


the Draft, I also turned this into a painting, with the band's permission.


Funeral for a Friend


Halifax (never used)


Minus the Bear


Maroon


Mark also organized tours and when he set up shop in Austin for the SxSW festival in 2007, I did something special for the occassion. A double bill of LIFETIME and My Chemical Romance, t-shirts and a poster.






Orange 9MM


Paint it Black


the Pink Spiders


Refused


Sacry Kids Scaring Kids


The Sounds


The Receiving End of Sirens


Sorry for the carpet-bomb-post but I figured I had to make up for my blog slackery lately.