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.

REJECTS

Occasionally when I start working on a project, the same basic idea will produce two (or sometimes even more)very different but equally strong potential directions in style. In those cases I usually just leave it up to the client to decide which one they feel more comfortable with using.
Which always leave a reject. These poor schmucks didn't tickle any fancies, so I'll post them here.
I can't divulge anything about the concept or the project as it still on-going.

Hope you like it.

BOLTposter

Every once in a while, when I have some money left over, I like to get some stuff printed, to send 'round to friend, colleagues, clients, people I would like to become clients etc.
So I did. Posters this time.

The posters were printed by the friendly and very professional folks at Drukkerij Terst and some of you will probably find one in the mail in the coming weeks.

Doodle Toosday

Just some doodlings I did recently. Hope these will keep you mildly entertained for now.

We could be heroes.

And now for something completely different.
Every once in a while I love to go on little excursions into styles and techniques I normally stay away from or not get a chance to get into.
This time Erik van Blokland from Letterror asked me to help him on a project for the Andreas Hofer Museum in Süd Tirol, in Italy (it's an Austrian part of Italy.. sort of).
Andreas is a folk hero in those parts and the museum wanted to show how heroes are often not made by their own actions, but more by how their actions are perceived, interpreted and recounted by the public.
So we made a hero factory, showing all kinds of heroes, from the historic to the modern and all their fans / makers.

I did all the little characters and Erik did the building and the type (he also made some nice little videos for the same exhibitions)

Here are all the hero-makers:








And these are all the heroes... can you name them all?








And this is the end result (click the pic for a closer look):

Nightmare

These are a few illustrations I did for the magazine Zeilen [Sailing]. The article, titled 'de Nachtmerrie' [the Nightmare] was the true story about a young Dutch sailor traveling around the Caribbean islands where he got found himself blackmailed (over a bogus poker debt) by Colombian gangsters to transport a shipment of drugs to Europe.
It's a harrowing story and the poor guy is now locked up in a French jail, where he can't even defend himself in court for fear of retributions as even in prison the gangsters threatened to harm his loved-ones if he were to testify.
Anyway... the illustrations; the first one is the main one, the other three are fillers.