For her birthday late last year i created this poster for Shon; it is the dialogue from my phone of the few text messages that went into arranging our first date, then the first month of our relationship afterward.

For her birthday late last year i created this poster for Shon; it is our dialogue from my phone of the few text messages that went into arranging our first date, then the first month of our relationship afterward. Arranged over 520 lines, the format is based on a radial convergence diagram with the calendar date arranged around the outside in white, then the timestamp of each message creates an inner-ring, with the text messages themselves reading inwards from the outside, all reading anti-clockwise. The centre (zero) ring is a series of dashed lines, one for every line of dialogue, hence why it looks darker than the five and two.

The process was considerably more complicated than originally anticipated and required a set of some 600 stepped radial splines, converted to text paths and hand-stitched together, which seemed to be the only way to allow text to run across lines without being interrupted.

The A0 piece was produced in InDesign and Illustrator and printed by large format printers Onward Display using a six-colour process.

I had wanted to create a piece for a while that nods towards one of my favourite films; 2001, and the visual simplicity of the film’s Tycho monolith with its silent, constant presence is obviously a perfect starting point. This is the first of (hopefully) a set of three prints and illustrates the moment immediately following the tragic impact of a small body against the large, omnipresent object.

The first of (hopefully) a set of three prints; the base element of this image started life as a photo of my microwave. I’m not great with microwaves, infact i tend to blow them up, and this one was only three months old when it went.

The unit itself had a very nice unmarked, uncluttered mirror front, which, in its own right, was actually a great piece of produce design and something I didn’t want to commit to the dustbin without at least giving it an aesthetic eulogy. So, to cut a long story short, i took a hammer and smashed it up. Unexpectedly, the mirrored front was plastic and didn’t crack as i assumed it would, instead breaking like shatterproof glass into thousands of pieces all over my kitchen floor.

I had wanted to create a piece for a while that nods towards one of my favourite films; 2001, and the visual simplicity of the film’s Tycho monolith with its silent, constant presence is obviously a perfect starting point. The structure of the 2001 monolith is mathematically relevant with the three sides of the object following a strict ratio based on the squares of the first three integers (1, 2, 3). The monolith is officially described as having a ratio of 1:4:9 with the depth being the smallest of those integers, and the length being the largest. This is an expression of (1×1):(2×2):(3×3). However, researching around, opinion is divided and states that the monolith doesn’t actually conform to this ratio, but instead conforms to the ratio 1:4:13, which incidentally is the same ratio seen in the Montparnasse Tower in Paris. 2001 was released in 1968, construction on the Montparnasse Tower begun in 1969. However, i couldn’t validate that particular opinion over multiple sources, so my monolith follows the original 1:4:9 ratio (or at least, as a flat object, the 4:9 ratio).

My imitation of Kubrick’s Tycho monolith stops there though; it is glossy, has rounded corners and the piece itself illustrates the moment immediately following the tragic impact of a small body against the large, omnipresent object.

Loosely titled ‘The Only Conceivable Outcome of Two Unaligned Ideals’ the piece is an exercise in appreciating the fragility of small things, that no matter how insignificant the latter may appear to the former, every encounter leaves its mark.

The original piece is 75x100cm (9000x12000px), which is also the biggest digital canvas i’ve ever tried to work with, and unfortunately doesn’t show particularly well as a small grab on a site like this.

Back in 2004 whilst at Kleber I was asked to create a site for Italian composer and producer Ferdinand Arno, promoting his studio; Quiet, Please! The concept had a special pre-requisite – the site was to have no descriptive words at all, so we’d need to look at an alternative way of communicating the concept. What started with that concept then evolved a couple of times over the next few years!

Back in 2004 whilst at Kleber I was asked to create a site for Italian composer and producer Ferdinand Arno, promoting his studio; Quiet, Please! The concept had a special pre-requisite, and not a particularly SEO-friendly one either, but Ferdinand didn’t really need the positioning. The site was to have no descriptive words at all, infact the only words that appeared in the whole site were in the navigation and the listings within the music library. And a restrained few on the contact form.

In order to present the methodology of the studio we needed to come up with a set of visual assets to communicate what the site, and the studio were about. Tom (Muller) and I came up with a sort of pulse-based flash intro (yes this was still acceptable then) that illustrated the intro music through the use of varied circular elements, blurred and in a small gamut of colours. The gentle bloom and undulation of these assets across a letterbox canvas picked out the audio and shaped it into something we could then translate to other elements of the site.

Later i took these assets and worked them up for a series of flat poster graphics that comprised a Magnasoma mini-series called Fluorescent Dialogue with ideas foraged from research into radial interfaces.

When it came to producing a series of eight abstract elements to accompany our service areas for the first Profission website and in printed collateral the same underlying concepts worked equally as well. Expressed as a series of brightly coloured circle elements in arrangements over black, these distinctive assets proved themselves to be a crucial component of what made the original site quite special. Later Alex and I looked at producing a colour-inverted version of the site to make portfolio presentation a little easier but other projects intervened and there was never enough time to produce the site, so they lay in template unused. I’ve always been quite fond of them so its nice to see them again.

This pretty stone was left by the previous owners of the the flat I bought about four or five years ago. I didn’t notice it for a while; fixed on a small marble shelf in the off-black fireplace in my lounge with candle wax. When I temporarily moved out I thought I should probably do something with it, and got to thinking about breaking the pebble in half and revisiting that initial impact, recording it and keeping it timeless.

This pretty stone was left by the previous owners of the the flat I bought about four or five years ago. I didn’t notice it for a while; fixed on a small marble shelf in the off-black fireplace in my lounge with candle wax. When I temporarily moved out I thought I should probably do something with it, and got to thinking about breaking the pebble in half and revisiting that initial impact, recording it and keeping it timeless.

Wrapped up in an old pillow-case I took it outside and hit it as many times as I needed with a hammer to break it in two, and it broke fairly cleanly. I placed the two parts and the fragments into an envelope for safekeeping.

My friend Darren took a couple of photo’s of it with much better kit and skill than I can muster, and then it sat on my hard drive for the best part of a year before I got round to doing anything with it.

I’m moving back next month so it seems fitting to have finished the process before returning. The original piece is 40x60cm and is going to wait patiently until I figure out what to use it for.

For two reasons, one of which is the forthcoming Humhum cards project. I got lucky when asked to tackle the Ace of Hearts; a nice, comfortable and somewhat regal card to work with. I wanted to do something in stone – something very austere. A certain somebody close has been cracking hearts recently so i think this was also something of a therapeutic process. It isn’t broken, and is adorned with a sash to indicate a solemn authenticity.

For two reasons, one of which is the forthcoming Humhum cards project. I got lucky when asked to tackle the Ace of Hearts; a nice, comfortable and somewhat regal card to work with. I wanted to do something in stone – something very austere. A certain somebody close has been cracking hearts recently so i think this was also something of a therapeutic process. It isn’t broken, and is adorned with a sash to indicate a solemn authenticity.

Print Res Version.