We began by establishing a basic brand. I made the following logo to capture the feeling of going to a live concert, the typography is a modification of the Diavlo free font by Jos Buivenga’s exljbris Font Foundry, making a non gender-specific pictogram of the ‘U’ from ‘GURO’.

Being on a tight budget and not being able to make a design from scratch, we went down the route of choosing an open source WordPress theme to build upon and inject the new brand into.

Now, GURO have established some web presence and a platform in which to blog, post music event details, stream music and engage easily with social networking and the journey for gaining followers as events begin to occur. The launch night for GURO will happen on July 7th.

I was also involved in branding their Facebook page, Twitter profile and promoting a competition for bands to take part in.

Search ranking is already doing well with the site appearing first page on the search terms “hampshire music promotion“.

Site is now live at guropromotions.co.uk

and remember, there are still two Beasties left!

been very busy on the creative and web design front and have a lot to blog about soon.

This is only my second attempt at a t shirt design for Threadless, because I’ve never felt particularly enthusiastic about one of my designs being printed. But it is a good opportunity to practice the Illustration skills then show a bunch of people.

This one is called ‘ZOOT!’ and was influenced by Cab Calloway and my fascination for Zoot Suits from 1940′s America – a fascination I think developed by watching Tom wear them in the old Tom and Jerry cartoons.

Anyway, go vote it, or tweet it, or whatever it is you kids do.

Some of my old friends from university have since been involved in musical projects. Megaton is a dub step group formed of two bassists (one of which is Daniel Henderson from metal band Aghast), Theo Brooke (also involved in other projects) and a producer Martyn Bell, who take influences from video game culture with a particular-but-not-exclusive focus on the post apocalyptic game series, Fallout.

The games are set in the future but have always had a retro, 40′s/50′s kitsch aesthetic to them. A characterisation of this would be the ‘Pip boy’ character which features heavily in the games as an assistive illustrated character within the computer interface of an electronic device (Personal Interface Processor) you carry in the game.

The group approached me with the idea to illustrate all the members of the band in the style of Pip Boy, and to have this image transposed on to the label of a detergent bottle, photographed by Daniel’s girlfriend. This image would be used as a cover for their upcoming E.P. “Rinse & Repeat“.

I began by drawing the lines in Photoshop, I decided against going all vector on this as the final image was to be used purely as a digital record cover. I cited images both images of the boys and of Pip Boy, whose image is readily available in lots of poses.

It was a challenge to strike a balance between including the elements that make Pip Boy, Pip Boy and also creating a visual likeness to the real life people at the same time.

Early line drawings

I then set about composing this on to the digital image of the bottle, colouring in underneath the characters and producing the faux detergent label which was to fall in line with the retro stylings of Fallout.

The bottles texture was grey scaled, copied and overlayed on top of the artwork and typography using various layer blend modes, this helped create the illusion that the imagery was really on the bottle. Rust marks were added in to the background and blurred in line with the natural soft focus of the camera.

(Click to embiggen)

Megaton’s Rinse & Repeat will be available next week, but meanwhile, checkout their soundcloud account by clicking here.

or listen to “Neutron Initiation” here.

“Nobunny knows who stole the eggs, ‘cept Chubba and The Sun”

Thanks to printed.com and bigstock photo for awarding me with £100 of printing and stock imagery credit.

We live in an age where any body and their mother can open an etsy account or sell things on ebay for free, but I believe it is this sort of personalised graphical branding that still makes freelance web designers like me relevant and it’s always a pleasure to give somebodies work an online platform.

This custom WordPress theme uses the Paypal framework to handle online ordering of prints with various mount options. Orders for prints can be made directly and/or enquiries can be initiated for purchasing originals. Otherwise, it’s just a great way to look at some lovely work.

Site is now live at jenniferoneillart.com

We decided Typepad was the most convenient platform to use and I developed a custom theme on it which was reflective of a set of photography sent to me, as well as the music itself of course. The whole process went incredibly smoothly, as I find it does, when you have some inspiring material to work with from the off set.

On the site we have the basic blog functionality of Typepad, a twitter feed and streaming music handled by Soundcloud (don’t even get me started on how I love Soundcloud).

The site isn’t live yet but will be at nickteehan.com

Psst, go preview the site here and listen to ‘Sidewalk Friend’ and ‘Stripmall City’, they are amazing. This guy is Rufus Wrainwright and Tom Waits at the same time.

Make your Laptop Holly powered today!

1280×800 – normal Holly -Click here to download.

1920×1080 – Holly HD -Click here to download.

1280×800 – pixelised Holly -Click here to download.

“Everybody’s dead, Dave”

Raymond Cheng is an up and coming freelance photographer based in Luton who was looking to get some of his portfolio online. When somebody approaches me with exciting creative work such as this, it’s always a pleasure to bring them some much deserved, professional looking online presence.

We took a minimalistic, functional approach with a heavily customised open source ‘full screen‘ WordPress theme, which we changed from black to white with neutral greys.

The crux of the website, browsing images, is handled by a visually customised jQuery lightbox script which allows for simple left/right navigation through the galleries.

With a view to leave as much of the focus on the work itself, we placed social media feeds and an about section within the widgetized footer of the site.

The home page is quite unique as well as it generates a grid layout of his latest postest images automatically.

We will be looking to extend the website later to handle online purchasing of Raymond’s work.

Check out a small portion of Raymonds Photography at raychengphotography.com

logo shown within the design not produced by me, but by a third party.

Flashpackering Guy is a travel blog aimed at travellers with a larger budget, whereas backpacking is traditionally associated with budget travel and destinations that are relatively cheap, flashpacking has an association of more disposable income while traveling and has been defined simply as backpacking with a bigger budget. “Flashpacking” is a neologism used to refer to an affluent backpacker.

The aim was to create a design that reflected this through a classy, stylised travel theme which managed to retain an element of humour.

Part of the brief required me to work with the Thesis framework for developing the theme. I found it very similar to my regular framework of choice, Thematic. I would describe Thesis as basically the same but with more user interface customizability for the end user. It also costs something but I found the level of support for developers very good.

There was a fairly major restructuring of the site markup. Multiple navigation menus, customised menu graphics, jQuery, a ‘Current Location’ status update-able through the dashboard, a home page slider and the usual social media and newsletter integration.

The site is currently being populated with content by the site owner, but for now, check out the screenshot above.

The theme is a modification of the free ‘Minimahl’ WordPress theme and features integration with Facebook, Google Calendars and Soundcloud – a perfect solution to web design on a budget.

Site is live at annathomasdrums.co.uk

In addition to promoting the new book in a content managed and custom branded manner to follow the book’s cover design, the site also allows visitors to order a digital copy which is emailed to them automatically upon clearing a payment. A physical copy of the book is also available via lulu.com and possibly Amazon in the near future.

Site is live at corporatocracybook.com

I challenged myself to draw a vector portrait from a grainy source photo.

and a Jewish Dalek. Actually, this is a (72×72) twitter icon for somebody, hence the lack of detail.

The design revamped the online store’s looks from an old design and introduced a new filter menu element to help people get to the type of notes they want to buy.

It’s always nice to work with people who are web savvy (this client will go on to develop his shop around my template), I even got wire frame diagrams to work with!

update: site is live now at zimbabwedollars.net