Keepin' It Casual

With modest pride I report that the logo I designed for our mates at Sugar Frosted Goodness gets a mention in the latest issue of Communication Arts. Admittedly the article is written by my good friend Ken Barber (typeandlettering.com and House Industries), so there's a tinge of nepotism to this.
Nevertheless, it made my day.

Have better look at the work that went into this thing here

Work in progress

Lately I've been doing more and more of, what is popularly know as, motion graphics. And usually they have contained mainly illustrated / animated materials, but a while back I bought an Olympus E-P2 (PEN2) which has quite formidable video capabilities. Granted it's no 7D by any means, but it does a few tricks very nicely.
Especially with the help of After Effect the results can be quite epic looking (if I do say so myself).

Anyway I've been working on this thing which is all about worrying. Waking up in the middle of the night and just uncontrollably stress about stuff.
It's not finished by a long shot... it will have a few more scenes, sharper editting and a score of some kind, but I am just curious what you people might think.
Any comments are welcome.

You can watch the hi-def version on my vimeo page.

Musn't Worry (in progress) from BOLTgraphics on Vimeo.

New old book

Just bought this beautiful little book at my favorite book store Nijhof & Lee. A treasury of German Tradmarks (volume one 1850 - 1925).
Well it does what is says on the box...

Votes Please!

I did a tee design for the kids at Limited T-shirts. They run an online t-shirt shop and they let the public vote to determine which design go into production.
Mine is up now and you have 28 days left to go over en vote for it!
You do have to register, but there's a lot of great quality nicely printed fabric.

The design is from an illustration which was also the bases for a painting I did a while ago. So some of you might recognise it.

I hope you'll grant me your vote...

Zeilen

Zeilen (Sailing) is a magazine about... you guessed it, sailing. And I've done illustrations for them before and they always let me basically do what I liked. Which is great!
This time however they let me come up with just about anything, and that actually proved a bit of a challenge.
Every year the magazine has a writing competition. They give readers a few words or a picture to inspire them to write a story about, with the central theme still being sailing of course.
This time I was asked to come up with an illustration to inspire the masses.

The editor gave me a few things to consider (calm seas, the guy with binoculars), but it needed something to add mystery. So I liked the idea of a bottle floating in the water, mainly for the above-water/under-water visual. But just the bottle wasn't enough... it needed something inside.
So here I considered a few things (among which a finger – too much) I decided on a key. It can open doors, lock someone in, it can represent power, wealth, danger, safety.. in short; plenty.

The sketch:


If the composition seems a bit lopsided it's because it's a full page spread, so it has some open areas to accommodate for text.

For the inks I wanted to try something different. I knew I was going to use Photoshop to color and I thought it'd be nice to have a bit of texture to my inks. Usually the my inks are usually tight black and white. This time it added black watercolors to the brushed inks with the intention of it adding a bit of depth.
Anyway here the are...
(oh and the editor didn't like the boat being on fire... so I left the smoke out)


And then the colored finals version:


Hope you like it.

World Cup Fever!!

It's been out for a while but as the Football World Cup is in full swing at the minute, I thought I'd show you this now.
Barcelona based ad-agency Vasava was commissioned by 55DSL and Panini to come up with a line of shirts (as part of a bigger campaign) to celebrate the World Cup and Football in general.
They invited artists from around the world to represent their country in a t-shirt design. I of course came out for the Netherlands.
We were free to do whatever we wanted with the only restriction being the use of colors, they had to be the national colors of out countries.

The idea behind my piece was the one of the boy dreaming of becoming a football star and one day competing in the World Cup.
Here's the sketch:



Inked and colored:




Then client thought they would prefer to have their logos incorporated into the design after all. Which was fair enough of course. Also, it wasn't possible for the fabric to have a color, so that had to become white.
With these amendments this became the final design:


Go buy one at the 55dsl online shop.

Hair

It's not often that I get to do illustrations for book-covers. Not sure why, I think it's because most people perceive my style to be too 'heavy' or whatever.
Anyway a few months ago, I was commissioned to do one, for the Dutch release of Mathilda Savitch by Victor Lodato.
The idea came from the graphic designer of the rest of the cover, Marlies Visser. It was to have the main type to be entangled in the hair of this girl Mathilda (who obviously is the main character of the book). And I love drawing hair, so I was more than happy to go along with it.
I did a sketch, but in the first sketch her eyes were too adult, too sexy really. I hadn't had a chance to read the book and didn't realize at first the Mathilda was a 13 year old... stupid mistake.
Anyway I amended the sketch to the satisfaction of Marlies and after, some haggling with the publishers over the colors, I finished the illustration.




Marlies added more typography, but unfortunately I don't have an image of that. But check out her website, maybe you can find it there.

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.