The BBC publishes a weekly gallery of readers’ pictures on a set theme. For week starting Thu 28t July the theme was wind, and I submitted the three photos below. One was selected and you can see it here (it’s at the end)). Stay tuned for more!
Archive for My Work
XPaperX
Ian worked for PaperX.com, a London-based B2B marketplace startup, in 2000. Last year he and two ex-colleagues organised a 10-year reunion party in Soho, where PaperX was based. I designed an invite, based on the original corporate identity (by Agency.com), but using a sketching / caricature style to bring back memories of starting new things, and Bjarne and Lex, who made it happen.
Textures 1 – London and Torino
I love the textures one can find, walking in any city. Here are some from Torino & London:
Stay tuned for more textures from Zurich and beyond!
More Christmas Cards!
Here are the 2009 & 2010 Christmas greetings, for those of you who didn’t see them first time round…
I decided to change the style from illustration to photography last year. Stay tuned for the 2011!
More, smaller paintings
The last painting I did took me ages, and I promised myself to stick to smaller formats in the future. Here’s Paola at the Porta Palazzo market in Torino, meeting a lemon grass for the first time!
Illustrations for Swiss Business
One of the best parts of my current role, the designer for the English language Swiss Business magazine, is creating illustrations for feature articles. The range of subjects is very wide, and I’m also free to use a wide range of styles. Here are some of the most recent ones (click on the images to see the full illustration in context):
Collage from newspaper and magazine clippings, for ‘Advertising or SPAM?’
Line art, for ‘Trends in Real Estate’
Illustrator composition, for ‘Multitasking Women’
Illustrator composition, for ‘Distance Learning Without the Distance’
Team identity: T-shirts for the ‘Sola Rainmakers’
Every year, on the second weekend in May, there is a 126 km relay race in the hills above Zurich, organised by the University sports club, and simply called Sola. Over 800 teams enter, and with 14 runners in each team, handovers between the runners can be chaotic, especially for new teams that haven’t run together before and might not recognize the person they’re handing over to.
To avoid this problem, and help bond the team, the Sola Rainmakers needed a visual identity to use on team t-shirts, and their twitter page (one of the main means of communications to the team, and the diary of the build-up and the day)
Logo / T-shirt Front
T-shirt Back
The name ‘rainmakers’ was chosen by the team captains as they both come from the west coast of Scotland, and this was reflected in both the colours (blue and white fomr the Scottish flag) and the cloud design (which also served to emphasize the hilly nature of the Sola course)
It worked! handovers were smooth and stress-free, and the team loved their t-shirts!
Christmas Marketing: Cards for LINE Communications AG
I designed Christmas cards for LINE Communication‘s Swiss subsidiary in 2008 and 2009.
The 2008 card used the logo and a simple line metaphor to create a simple, yet bold illustration. At this time, LINE was relatively new in Switzerland, so the Christmas greetings were written in Switzerland’s four official languages, to emphasize LINE’s new presence in Zurich and local knowledge.
The 2009 card was illustrated using pencil sharpenings in LINE’s four brand colours. The message: we’re getting ready to do sharp, focused work for you in 2010!
Rather than a conventional design, the card folded out into a long landscape format. This allowed for more flexibility in the graphic design, and helped it stand out from other next to other cards. It also meant that envelopes were not required, reducing cost, waste and admin time.
Skinning twitter
My first piece of web design just went live! (I’ve done logos for web before, but not much more than that.) I ‘skinned’ Ian’s twitter page, with a design that reflects both personal interests (mountains and skiing) and professional interests (using the logo design I did for the jayeyesea blog.)
Skinning twitter is pretty easy – the main job is the background image – the challenge is to do something that works well at different screen widths – to deal with this the full image is 1920 pixels wide, and the ‘seahorse’ logo repeats at carefully chosen intervals to work well with common screen resolutions (I hope! Tell me if it doesn’t.) You can then adjust the colours of text, links, etc under settings->profile.
Here are some screen-shots, or check it out at http://twitter.com/ianleader.
Stippling
Stippling is the technique of using small dots to simulate varying degrees of 
solidity or shading.
This technique is similar to — but distinct from — pointillism, which uses dots of different colors to simulate blended colours.
In printmaking, this technique became popular as a means of producing shaded line art illustrations for publication, because drawings created this way could be reproduced in simple black ink.
Here is my latest work using this technique: mixed graphite pencil and colour ink on white card. The monochrome stippling works rather well to illustrate a typical window of the Swiss Region of Graubünden.
It’s a leaving card for our neighbours, who are moving to Pontresina at the end of this month.
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