3D + sound

As you might have noticed in my last few posts I've been getting more and more into animation/motion graphics and lately I've spending quite a bit of time in Cinema 4D.
Here's a simple little experiment in sound-triggered animation (I made the music in Ableton Live 8).

As this is all self-schooling any input is appreciated.
Thanks!

ps: best to watch it in HD on VImeo by the way...

Scissors & Spice

Here's a blog that might interest you, if not for the (to quote the description) "clever crafting, comforting vegetarian and vegan recipes, perusing [of] well designed housewares, fabric, paper goods, vintage finds and unique clothing, getting creative with your children and appreciating the cuteness in the world around us", then at least for the fantastic piece of hand-lettered type.

The blog is run by Eva Lynn Barber and the type is from the hand of her husband and my friend Ken Barber.
Check it out, it'll make you smile.

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.

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.