Making Money

This week, the UK’s new Pound Coin entered circulation – Its biggest change in 34 years. While I do have an interest in coins, going to one of a handful of locations to clamour for one of the first in the country? Not that interested. A fancy quid will crop up in my change soon enough.

Left: Old and Busted (1983-2017). Right: New hotness (2017-).

Anyway, money. At work, we have competitions and offers. Some of them have cash prizes, so I had to draw us some coins. The best way, I decided, was to do them in Illustrator with the 3D effect – this let me draw it once, then copy and paste, repeating, resizing and rotating the graphic to add variety.

Partial artwork of Win £500 flyer
My 2015 custard coloured coins – Make it rain!

I’m going to briefly go over how to make a 3D coin in Adobe Illustrator, then talk about the new Pound Coin graphics I created last month.

Cheque please!

My company has giant cheques. You know the ones; when there’s a donation to charity, or someone wins a cash prize, you see a photo in the paper of a happy chappy holding an oversized rectangle.

We had a number of big paper cheques, supplied by our chosen bank, rolled up in a fat parcel tube. It was decided that we needed something better, ideally personalised with our own branding, and more hard-wearing.
This is what we came up with.

big-cheque-hero

Taking shape

The basic layout of all cheques is the same, so I took a lot of measurements of the big paper ones we had, with both tape measure and ruler…

The Caravan Christmas Switch On

This Christmastime we flipped the big switch: The new Caravan Guard website is now live!
My previous post was prompted by the building of this all-new, responsive domain, which I can now talk about a bit here.

To be clear, I didn’t code the company site. It’s a sprawling, multi-functional, many-legged beast that our experienced resident web developer got to build from the ground up! No, my weight went into creating and renovating images for the frontend (and lots of testing on desktop, tablet and smartphone)… the baubles for the tree, as it were.

caravanguard.co.uk (for desktop, tablet and mobile)

Motorhome Maladies

The perilously perched Motorhome is introducing another thing wot I did at work… I put together an infographic / illustrated stats which cover the last few years of Caravan Guard’s motorhome insurance claims.

You can see the whole thing on the company blog herevia the below image, or on visual.ly. You can click it again in the C.G. post to go super-big. I’ve chopped the full-length preview of what awaits you into three, so you can see it at a reasonable size: To soak in all the graphical fineries, though, you should just click through already!

Caravan Guard Motorhomes Insurance Claims - Click to visit

Caravans and Bicycles

In February I started working for Caravan Guard (and it’s sister company Leisuredays), a medium-sized, family run insurance company. It’s no secret: My CV’s available on this website, after all. I’m in the Marketing department… as a Graphic Designer. Last month I moved to ‘Permanent contract’ status.

Success Kid and company logo
Success Kid approves.

I’ve been doing a huge amount of wonderful stuff, both straight-laced and silly, for both the Leisuredays re-branding and more general tasks. Making the sky blue on overcast photos. Adding and removing signs. Removing people. We’ve got new and updated booklets, flyers, folders, tiny stickers and big banners into production. I’ve made a truckload of icons, graphs and graphics, while correcting and refining the existing sets. I even got talking cows into a milk-bottle shaped mailer.