Margo Plenge's Graphic Design Blog

BBC Pictures – Wind

margoplenge — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 16:24:15 +0000

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!

Brooch Time

margoplenge — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 19:17:52 +0000

When we were at the Balôn last month, we found a box full of old wrist watch faces selling for between €0.50 and €2.00 (for the ones that still contained part of the mechanism attached to the face). I spent almost an hour choosing the best ones, and last week made two brooches. Here they are, along with a few photos of the faces alone:

(Last photo credit: Randa Carranza)

XPaperX

margoplenge — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 20:26:33 +0000

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.

What I bought at the Gran Balôn

margoplenge — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 16:54:30 +0000

Last month I visited Torino, and went to the Gran Balôn, an amazing flea market just north of the centre. I bought two practical and beautiful items for the house, an OMG stove-top espresso maker, and an old wooden draw (and you can’t have too many draws, can you?).

If you like these, there’s more to come…

Textures 1 – London and Torino

margoplenge — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 19:27:25 +0000

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!

margoplenge — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 19:18:16 +0000

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!

Vintage Photography

margoplenge — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 15:20:48 +0000

Last Christmas I received a wonderful gift from my Dad in Lima: my grandparents photo albums from the 1920s – 1940s. I scanned some of the photos, and also the best album pages, that my grandfather Oscar carefully laid out captioned:

More, smaller paintings

margoplenge — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 19:09:20 +0000

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

margoplenge — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 16:38:34 +0000

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’

margoplenge — Mon, 10 May 2010 14:43:15 +0000

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!