Margo Plenge’s Graphic Design Blog

Christmas Marketing: Cards for LINE Communications AG

April 2, 2010 · Filed under Commercial, My Work · Tagged card, christmas, logo

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.

Leave a comment »

‘My best piece’ – the Chicken Brick in Marmite Magazine

March 24, 2010 · Filed under Reprints

One of the magazines I sometimes do layout on is ‘Marmite‘, the leading, and oldest Swiss food and drink magazine. It includes a column ‘mein bestes Stück’ (My best piece), where people describe a favourite or unusual piece of cooking equipment that they own.

I featured in the March edition, where I talked about the Chicken Brick that Ian’s mother gave us in 2007 – these are quite common in the UK, but almost unheard of in Switzerland. You can read the article here (German) or read a completely different article about Chicken Bricks from ‘The Times’ here, if you prefer English.

Leave a comment »

Skinning twitter

February 13, 2010 · Filed under My Work · Tagged twitter, web design

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.

Leave a comment »

Stippling

July 25, 2009 · Filed under My Work

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.

Leave a comment »

Hand-dryer competition (CWS)

May 31, 2009 · Filed under Competitions, My Work

CWS-boco manufactures hygiene solutions and work clothing. This year they launched a new line of towel and soap dispensers, Paradise Line, with interchangeable front covers, so customers could “…display images or text…, corporate logos, and communications of various kinds…”

To promote the launch, they ran an international competition to design a front cover for the cotton towel dispenser, on the themes of:

Emotions – Lifestyle: nature elements, freshness, cleanliness, ecology, health.
Technique – hygiene: The towels rolls are made of 100% cotton.
Abstract: Visionary, controversial or critical approaches are welcome.

(translated from the Italian)

CWS products are everywhere – hotels, bars, airports, public building, etc, in many cultures and languages. So I decided, to base my design, on an internationally recognised format, that we’re already used to seeing in multiple languages – the washing instruction label!

This idea also fits well with the emphasis CWS put on cotton towels rather than paper.

Unfortunately I didn’t win this time – you can see the winners here.

Leave a comment »

Logos and Business Cards

May 18, 2009 · Filed under Commercial, My Work · Tagged twitter

The latest round of logos and business cards:

TwitDiary - your life, one twit at a time, coming soon:

JayEyeSea - tech blogging and new ideas from Ian Leader & Jon Bradford: Read the rest of this entry »

Comments (1) »

Bookbinding: The Little Prince

April 25, 2009 · Filed under Crafts, My Work · Tagged bookbinding, illustration

‘The Little Prince’ is one of my favorite books, so I decided to bind and illustrate a copy, and give it to my niece on her 11th birthday. She told me that she really liked it. You can see more of my bookbinding here.

Leave a comment »

Snail Collage

March 13, 2009 · Filed under Crafts, My Work · Tagged 3D, card

My niece Maria Fernanda is now 8 years old, and since she always liked snails, I made a little 3D collage for her birthday, inspired by her fascination for strange creatures…

Comments (1) »

Red Bull Art of Can 2003

January 27, 2009 · Filed under Competitions, My Work · Tagged cans, Dublin, kite, Red Bull, snowboard

This was lots of fun! It was back in 2003 and I knew the ‘Art of Can’ contest run by Red Bull was calling for entries. I had to do it, I thought!

At the time I was living in London, and Ian and I used to go to Primrose Hill with our 5m power-kite and I thought it could be cool to do a sculpture of a can flying a kite – then it was no longer just flying a kite but became snow boarding as well.

After explaining what my concept was, I got my entry into the contest and called it ‘Another Kind of Wings’, referencing the Red Bull slogan, “Red Bull gives you wings”.

Development

Here some development ideas:

Making it

2003, the hottest summer this decade across Europe (36°C), and it was so hot in our tiny flat in Camden Town. Working sanding wood and cutting mesh wires was tough and sweaty. I had only the kitchen table to work on; there was no more room at all. We decided the snowboarder was going to be a girl and we named her Leeloo-Lola (Leeloo from ‘The Fifth Element’ and Lola from ‘Lola Rennt’ – because I like orange)

Here some ‘in the making’ pictures:

And the finished work:

The Dublin Show

We packed and delivered Leeloo-Lola with her kite and board to Dublin. This was really hard, the package was more than a meter tall, and I was afraid she was not going to get there in 1 piece!

One day in October I got a letter from Red Bull saying that not all of the entries had been shortlisted but mine had and they were inviting me and a friend to the ‘Art of Can’ exhibition in Dublin. There were 300 entries and only 50 shortlisted and I was one of them, I couldn’t believe it!

The show was very good. Lots of photographers and press, performing dancers, all those awesome ‘can’ pieces and lots of champagne and mini fish and chips in wonderful paper cones! After the show, we all headed to a party hosted by Red Bull.

No, I didn’t win any of the prizes, but the satisfaction of creating Leeloo-Lola, the kite-boarder and seeing the people admiring her – believe me – was enough!

Here some pics from the show:

Leave a comment »

Photo Books – By Hand

January 18, 2009 · Filed under Crafts, My Work · Tagged album, book

I’ve used sites like Photobox to make photo albums, and although it’s very convenient to do it on-line and quite cheap, the layout is very restricted, so you can’t apply all your creativity into it. The latest book I made is this one – I did buy the book, but added quite a lot in, using printed photos, ink stamps and different papers to add something extra.

The pictures were scanned from slides taken in the 70′s, and sometimes I kept the ‘vintage’ colours. Others have been retouched and enhanced.