Northern Monkey

My brother is a web developer who lives down south. He’s doing so well that he’s starting up a Limited company to be his own boss: Daft Apeth Industries, a name he’s been using for years. Naturally knowing what I do, he called up and said I could help with his branding.

Starting out, I drew both humoured chimps in flat caps and self-closing HTML tags with hammers. Here are the neater ones:

daft134
Bit of a Soviet thing going on with the hammers and red.

Brother liked the font on the latter, and the ape on the former. The feedback was “make him less goofy and more angular”, in black and white or one-colour (clearer and saves on print costs)…

Stripping it back to the outlines, I challenged myself to re-draw the Apeth without using the Convert Anchor Point Tool (I love that little hollow cursor). Only straight lines. The result wasn’t too shabby…

daft-angular

Wiki Walk

One of my pastimes is to tinker with wikis. I amend text, fix references, apply cleanup tags, the usual. Sometimes images come into it: Hence today’s update.

For Wikipedia itself, it’s mainly been photo and diagram cleanup. The one i’ll highlight is the diagram on Xbox 360 technical problems, as it required some learning of EPS file formatting. And because i’m a PS3 owner. Teehee.

xboxfail-sidebyside
Left: Before. Right: After.

Commitment, Salvation and Diction

I’ve reached that age bracket where a lot of my friends are getting married. I made a card last winter for one couple who got hitched, and yesterday another pair tied the knot!

I’ve known Mr West for almost a decade, and the now Mrs West for nearly as long, so they most certainly had to have a homemade card too. This one is also a pen and watercolour work, yet there’s no imitation of famous artists this time around.

Wedding Card for Mr & Mrs West
Deciding the inscription took some time.

This duo of feelies will likely become a trilogy, as there is one more wedding next month. The occasion is on May the Fourth, so stay tuned to see if I infringe on any Star Wars copyrights.

An acquaintance (who is already wed, for those keeping score) is branching out into his own first aid / CPR training business, and he knew I was the guy to hit up for a logo. Research showed that this kind of company always seems to use a combination of lovehearts, heart monitor lines and first aid crosses for it’s identity, so this one took a bit of a think to make more distinct. There was a heap of back-and-forth communication involved: Getting it down to case designs, then the decals, the colouring, selecting the font and word arrangment…

Save Someone logo - highlights of progress
Just some of the options exchanged by email.

Imitation and expansion

In the last couple of months i’ve got into the work of Scott C., particularly his Great Showdowns series.

This is Akira vs Tetsuo.
This is Akira vs Tetsuo.

Also, a friend got married last weekend – the same one that received the social butterfly, if you’re keeping track of such things.

The card I handed to the groom at their reception sports a cheery watercolour of the newlyweds in Scott’s style. I haven’t used watercolours in a long time, so it worked out nicely for a “first go”!

Groom, if you have lost the card, I will tell Liam Neeson that you took his daughter.
Groom, if you have lost the card, I will tell Liam Neeson that you took his daughter.

Scott’s gonna have a table at the Thought Bubble comics convention next week: I’ll get him to sign my copy of his new Great Showdowns book, and maybe get to show him the above!

So, “expansion”? Regular client and friend Final Boss Fight – The video game news site has grown into a whole network! I didn’t brand A to Play (playthrough videos), and Pixel Gaiden (editorials) was straight-foward, but AutoFire (news feed) had a little journey. Observe:

The joypad buttons say "FBFN", as in "Final Boss Fight Network".
The joypad buttons say “FBFN”, as in “Final Boss Fight Network”.

The top one was pretty unintelligible at small sizes, while the second one (originally with a red backing) looked like it should be hung outside a fire station. To give each site different colours, blue and purple came into play. Then it moved into the same frame-size as the main site and editorial logos, and finally, by request, pixelated to match the existing hub logo.

A bunch of other assets were cooked up too – a couple of CRT TVs, favicons, and a few pics to replace the stock ones on the network hub, including a quick shot of my games shelf and a Store image.

New FBF assets, October 2012
Pixel Gaiden is a Phoenix Down quill and Minecraft paper, by the way.

There’s one more logo, but the site’s not live yet so it’s still under wraps. It’s not pixular, I promise.

Random ending: I updated the mobile phone icon on my Contact page, because I haven’t used a phone with those things called “buttons” since 2010. The old one was a Nokia 3110c – It’s now an Orange San Francisco II.

icon-mobile

icon-phone

Many, many Caterpillars

A scant few days after my last post, I was offered a commission!

Cliffe Castle museum are revamping their materials, including the boards for a nature trail. They decided that their rather “dry” images for the children’s sections weren’t cutting it anymore. “Cliffe the Caterpillar” would be born!

Cliffe the Caterpillar - first sketches
Initial sketches. Caterpillar #9, ‘The Devil’s Hotdog’, was quickly dismissed.

The first stage of this project was to produce images of a caterpillar’s four life stages… to go on the five information boards. Ah. Easily solved by adding “emerging from chrysalis” as the fifth picture.

I provided some rough inks of a range of caterpillars, eggs and chrysalides to choose from, allowing them to mix & match parts for their ideal mascot. Once the final design was sorted, the chosen images could be polished up supremely.

Cliffe the Caterpillar - Some concept inks

We’re still hammering out who owns the rights to the final images, so i’ll play it safe and show you one Cliffe, a bit faded & through a watermark:

Cliffe The Caterpillar, life stage 2 (watermarked)

The project continues into October, with the creation of Cliffe reading a map, eating leaves and suchlike.
*Yes, that does mean there is Cliffe The Caterpillar The Butterfly. Don’t be too logical.