More portraiture

Over the last few years I've been asked more and more to do portrait. For a variety of clients, but mainly for a Dutch magazine call the REVU. About 6 weeks ago I finished the last out of a series of 4 portraits of this writer named Henk van Straten.

Every week Henk covers a story about people that ended up in court, all for different reasons. Some severe, others not so.
The brief: a portrait of Henk (showing off his tattoos, which suit his young and punchy style of writing) and 'something to do with the justice system'.

All Hands...

It's not very often one comes across companies that value the importance of their internal communication as much they do their external one. Usually when organizations even understand its importance they don't want to spend any real money on motivating, informing or educating their employees about their plans and strategies.

Not so with Kabam. This games developer, specializing in free to play online titles, has set some big goals for itself and wants everybody on board and motivated. So they came up with a little print campaign to run in the halls of the Kabam offices.

It was going to be a series of posters, inspired by wartime propaganda of the 1940'. Basically rallying the Kabam troops. There were going the have about 11 posters made in total and I was lucky enough to be asked to design one of them.
The brief was the stuff of dreams and basically came down to:
"It has to be inspired the 1940' propaganda style of posters, use the copy supplied, try to have the poster represent the different areas of expertise within the company... go do what you do."
Great!

So I got to it...
As some of you might know by now, I'm a real sucker for all design stemming from this era of history so I had to really contain myself and not get too carried away with the proposals
I did two sketches.

One was a quite literal representation of the copy, which is something quite typical of the posters in those days.
In the second one I tried add a little more dynamism, a bit more of the old 'marching towards the bright future'

Kabam like the hands better and to be honest I had to agree with them.
They weren't really feeling the '51%' in the roundel and also had some concerns about the legibility and placement of the "fighting our way back to"

So I fixed it and send in my second proposal, in which also went a bit more into the colour use I thought would be nice. I also sent along a sample of how I wanted to execute the final illustration.
I wanted the poster to have a lithography feel, make it look nice and olde. It was a style I had applied before, but was a slight (but fun) departure from what I usually do. No inking involved this time, just going form the pencils straight to vectors and then to photoshop for some trickery.

The go to finalize was given and I started on the final piece. The only thing that was bugging me about the typography was the "fighting our way to 51%" line... it was too frilly. It needed to be more robust. So I stripped it all the way down to a simple brushed display face (using House Industries' House Slant from their Sign Painter collection).

(click it to get a better view)

Let's be friends

Not sure if I mentioned this before, but BOLTgraphics is now available for 'liking'.

There's an honest to goodness facebook page on which I post and share all kinds of random news, clips, tid-bits, loosely connected to realm of design, illustration and BOLTgraphics.

It'd be nice to see you there.

Robothon 2012

This coming March the conference on type design and technology called Robothon will once again be held in The Hague, The Netherlands and as ever it's being organized by Erik van Blokland and Paul van der Laan.
Although they are both gifted graphic designers themselves, they thought it was a good idea (don't ask me why) to let me design the logo for this year's conference.

The brief was simple: "Do what you like" and as a guideline they gave me a few words:
- UFOs (.ufo is and I quote "a cross-platform, cross-application, human readable, future proof format for storing font data")
- 2012 (as in the end of the world... maybe)
- robots (Robofont is a .ufo font editor which will be launched at the conference)
- general 'nerdyness' (it is after all "type design and TECHNOLOGY")

It was plenty for me to go on.
At first I thought about doing some Gigantor (Osamu Tezuka) and Ultraman inspired stuff...

...but I opted against that route. This kind stuff doesn't really come across in Roman characters and I din't want to go the 'faux-kanji' route.

Instead I started looking for more western inspiration like the science fiction tv-shows from the seventies:

This would give me that nerdy edge, the space, the UFOs... time to get sketching.
I did a couple of sketches at first trying to fit type into the shape of a flying saucer... or have the logo be emblazoned on the chest-plate of a giant robot (still hadn't fully let go of that Gigantor idea), but that would make the thing way to bulky.

So this one wasn't going to let it be squeezed into a mold of some UFO. I had to give it some room to stretch it's legs... Although I liked the interlocking, the UFO thing had to go.

I built the basic character-shapes in Illustrator and then deformed them, to give it that spacey "zoom into the future of 30 years ago" type of feel. After that I adjusted weight and contrast where it had all gone a bit wonky from the deformation.

After that I added the space-ship (which sort of resembled a pointed calligraphy pen), the 2012, colours, drop-shadow and some Kana (a word in Japanese characters that, as my underdeveloped knowledge of the language assured me, was saying "RO-BO-TO-N")and it was done...
Through the wonders of Twitter we found out that although the Kana did spell "ROBOTON" the "TH" would in Japanese more commonly be transcribed to an S sounding character (resulting in "ROBOSON"). It was corrected...

Good Luck

Gus typography

Good friends had a baby boy, I decided to write his name. I liked the name and can always use the practice.
I made it all nice a blingy...
Hope you like.

Dyzack's Mangy Soul

I designed a sleeve for the new album, by my friend Dyzack, named "This Mangy Soul".
We decided to have it printed on a genuine old Heidelberg letterpress (with some hot type for good measure).
I don't have any pics of the end result yet (as it only officially came out today) but I shot some video on the day we were printing.
Made a little promo:

Get the album at Dyzack's site.



Check it out in full HD at my vimeo account.

Rituals

I just posted a new film/music experiment on my vimeo page. You can watch it here too, but on vimeo it's all HD and stuff.

Shot and edited on the evening of May 22nd of this year.
One of the family rituals that takes place in my house every day.

I used my Olympus PEN2 with a 35mm Canon FD lens.
Music was done in ableton using samples from a piece called "Darha Nopigom" as it was performed by Byungki Hwang (it's tradional Korean music)



Oh and in other news... you can now 'like' BOLTgraphics on Facebook... if you're into that kind of thing.

Ganbatte Nihon

I did another t-shirt design for LimitedTshirts.com and this time it's actually about something.
I will send all the proceeds of the sales to the Dutch Red Cross Japan relief fund (giro 6868) and the kids and Limitedtshirts told me they will match what I make and donate that too.
Please go to LimitedTshirts.com, register and vote... and buy the t-shirt!
Thanks!

Austrian Tradition

Last month I spent a week's holiday in the beautiful town of Ehrwald in Austria together with my wife, our daughter and my in-laws. This being the first time I was ever in the Alps in the winter I was very impressed by all the natural splendor the country had to offer.
Besides all the beauty, food, snowboarding and 'gemütlichkeit' though, the thing that I was also really impressed by was the many pieces of the hand-painted signage on many of the buildings there.
Of course most used the nice texturas, frakturs and bastardas you'd expect in this part of the world, but there were also a few nice more modern pieces.
Here are a few of the nicer examples (in my opinion).

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.