Eye candy

Hey world.

New assignment. Make a poster for testcamp, a scheme for young graphic designers. Simple enough.

With this image, I'm feeling like I'm finding my own personal style. It's a style I like to call Visual Free-Form, or, in layman's terms, make the viewer find something new in the image the 20th time they look at it. It's something one of my favorite artists, Hieronymus Bosch, did back in the Middle ages. The concept is simple; visually represent the activities that testcamp and its parent company Nørgård Mikkelsen are known for, i.e. radiospots, tv ads, posters, logos, graphic design and alternative advertising.

Now, I'm not going to start adding speakers, tv sets and the like. That's just too simplistic and obvious. Consumers can always understand when they are being patronized and they act accordingly. It's one of my pet peeves that advertisers don't respect their target group's intelligence. The connections are a little obscure and I want to leave it up to you to find which is which. That's part of the charm of this style, trying to figure out its internal logic. Ok, here is a hint, graphic design is represented by the spray tags.

One element that I wanted to add from the beginning was the stencil-like font and the spraying behind the testcamp logo. That's a carry-over from the current theme that testcamp is running. It creates a sense of continuity and evolution.

One element I DIDN'T want was stupid quotes and snappy one-liners, like "THE FUTURE OF ADVERTISING" or "THINK YOU GOT WHAT IT TAKES?!!!!1111oneeleven!!!!". If an image doesn't sell its product to you with a glance (and that's all posters and ads get by consumers, psychologists say), then you better rethink your concept. In addition, walls of text, while informative, will never work. It's called graphic design for a reason, it's the communication of messages with images. If you need to explain yourself to your target group, then you're using text as a crutch, i.e. your images are not adequate. Marlboro doesn't need to explain why the cool guy in the cowboy hat is smoking or the pleasures of smoking.

With this, I leave you to the poster I designed. Have fun.

Aim for the head

I recently entered a competition for a tshirt design celebrating the 2008 Copenhagen Zombie Pub Crawl. Have I mentioned that I love zombies? Oh yes, I do.

This is one of my designs for the competition. The first thing that came into my head when I was doing brainstorming was George Romero, Ben Templesmith and the 70s in this order. George Romero for the obvious reasons, he is the grandaddy of the modern zombie genre. Ben Templesmith because he is my favourite horror graphic novel artist and because his style is so different than anything else out there, it looks like a cross between oil painting and stenciling (check out his website). The 70s because the zombie genre has been affected by this decade in terms of its politics and themes.

So, I decided that my design should have four elements; a) have an evocative image that tells a story of a world gone horribly wrong, b) be atmospheric, c) have a modernised 70s feel, d)refer to the event in some way.

Based on that I chose to give the Little Mermaid (a landmark of Copenhagen) a zombie face, then turn it into a stencil, and throw in a big splash of red color. Simple.

Note that the design looks a bit like the posters for the 30 Days of Night movie, which is based on the graphic novel of the same name, drawn by Ben Templesmith.

Heavenly Spheres

I reaaaaaaaally like drawing planets and space. In Photoshop, with stencils, I love it. Must have been all those Sunday afternoon Star Wars reruns.

So, here is a new Photoshop image, called "Worlds At War". I like the juxtaposition of the calm horses below with the carnage on the planet above. It still is a work in progress, but I like the composition, so the main elements are there.

Stencils and spray paintings

Stencils and spraying have been demonized by public authorities everywhere, simply because they are the favourite tools of vandals everywhere. However, I see them merely as tools alongside brushes, graphic pens, Photoshop and cameras. Can anyone argue that Bansky is NOT a graphic artist? Nope. The only problem for me is that I can't use them when the weather is bad, as I need to be outside so that fumes don't kill me.

Here are a few examples of my experimenting with stencils and spray cans.