design portfolio

branding, the long game

2007-07-01T09:36:00.001-07:00

These calendars are about ...

... selling the idea of a new cover design to an academic department

... making that design attractive enough to cause other departments to want to use/copy it

... making that design flexible enough to allow for different predominant colour schemes (as well as some small variations in design)

... thereby achieving a brand for the entire academic institution, more or less through the back door

... allowing that brand to evolve (according to client) while still preserving the essential visual identity (for example: the latest calendar, standing at left in the bottom photo)

academic brochures ... for the military

2007-07-01T09:18:00.000-07:00

Promoting academic programs for the military is a bit like shopping for a holiday: you don't want to look like just another tourist but you also have to remember what the local uniform is. These brochures are for (from top) the undergraduate (second image is inside spread), graduate and OPME programs. All three started in the same design series but the bottom brochure is shown in its second incarnation, already evolving.

corporate identity

2007-07-01T09:10:00.001-07:00

When I first came to RMC, there was no idea of a corporate or institutional identity, and every department did their own thing. Because they're so much like annual reports (in the sense that they are flagship documents), the academic calendars seemed like a logical place to begin building a visual sense of character. Pictured at top are the graduate, undergraduate and continuing-studies calendars. The graduate calendar cover above is a scan of the actual book, so please excuse the line from where it's been bent open.

military writers handbook

2007-07-01T08:15:00.001-07:00

Keeping things simple, iconic. From top ...

cd case, outside
cd case, inside
information package (folder, cd case, insert)

promotions

2007-07-01T08:09:00.001-07:00

This little tent card was designed to promote readers-choice-type awards for Winnipeg restaurants. I like it because, despite having to throw so much information into such a small space, I was able to keep it playful and elegant.

Macbeth

2007-07-01T07:45:00.000-07:00

"The Scottish Play" and its hold on my imagination ...
... in a paste-up poster from design school (top)
... in a painting on canvas (middle), where the Lady is in the swirling stamps
... in a wee write-up on the Kurosawa version (below) (note: the image is from the dvd cover, and is not my design)

Throne of Blood

Shakespeare + Kurosawa = x

x + Noh Theatre + Sengoku Jidai = Throne of Blood

Which I watched this weekend. It was all fog and haunted landscapes and faces frozen in terror or rage. Everything is unmoored. This includes the removal of all Shakespeare's language, replaced by something more spartan and starkly theatrical. And while Kurosawa messes with the plot, holding his story to its own internal logic, all the main ambitions remain desperately the same: war, envy, treachery, madness, downfall. The character of Asaji (Lady Macbeth) is uniquely memorable for the creepy low orbit of her own high-minded damnation.

black and white photography

2007-07-01T07:14:00.001-07:00

These three photographs (8x10 prints done the hard way: negatives, enlargers, rocking trays, etc) were taken in my father's poolhall and barbershop (in Perdue, Saskatchewan, 1991). While the clientele were almost exclusively of the railway-worker, brush-cut variety, tips were still strongly encouraged.

various brochures

2007-06-30T13:49:00.001-07:00

One of the ways that government – like all large, corporate-like institutions – speaks (to the public, to itself) is through pamphlets and brochures, and that particular kind of speaking travels a line somewhere between explaining and convincing (the latter being mostly of the aren't-we-doing-a-good-job? variety). The designer's role is to make sure those speeches come out in a coherent and engaging manner.

book cover design

2007-06-29T10:36:00.001-07:00

An appropriately serious design for the cover of a report (released as a book by the Canadian Forces Leadership Institute) on the mission to the former Yugoslavia. The leaf I picked up off the ground in Ottawa, while on a trip (I was living in Winnipeg at the time).

promoting the army reserve

2007-06-29T10:30:00.001-07:00

My work with the reserves started with trying to create a plug-and-play (five-fold, bilingual-tumble) brochure template for every army (and navy, and air) reserve unit in the country, something they could feed their own images into and have a good idea as to how it would turn out (previously each unit had tried to create their own stuff – with wildly mixed results). The templates were distributed in the form of a cd, with the jacket explaining the technical side of getting a brochure printed (especially the costs involved, with an emphasis on price per item). Almost always, however, the unit's recruiting officier would come back to me to get the work done (straightest line, after all), meaning the entire exercise was a bit of slight-of-hand, in that it achieved a consistent brand simply by offering a single solution to a diverse group of customers.

A 36x48 poster and two brochures (front panel). The work from the reserves continued to transform and expand, until eventually I did just about everything for them, from brochures to books to posters to banners to bookmarks to full-blown kiosk displays (the instant-set-up kind you see at career fairs, where the walls are like murals). In the end they had a little ceremony for myself and the project manager, where I was given a very nice pen set.

book cover design

2007-06-29T10:24:00.001-07:00

I love this cover because I took a harsh, flat, military photograph and made it into something like a Turner painting (and also, that I got away with doing that).

aide-memoires for peacekeepers

2007-06-29T10:12:00.001-07:00

Aide-memoires are abbreviated phrase books for peacekeepers ("I am Canadian", "I am going to search you now", "Stop or I will shoot", etc). I created books in languages such as Serbian-Croatian, Arabic, Creole, Spanish and others. They were printed on a special Yupo stock so as to be resistant to water, and conformed to certain dimensions so as to fit in the top pocket of a soldier's uniform.

corporate design, Veterans Affairs Canada

2007-06-29T09:52:00.000-07:00

This information package (client-oriented, explaining claims) had Canada-wide distribution.

book cover design

2007-06-29T09:45:00.001-07:00

Well, if we're going to split hairs, it's actually more of a manual cover design. Aside from its own merits, I like it because it was created from nothing, just imagination and Photoshop.

advertising design, newsprint

2007-06-29T09:16:00.000-07:00

This full-page ad (you can see that the second image is scanned right from newsprint) had an unexpected trajectory ...

I had the cd cover with its full-colour photograph to work with but I wanted something more simplified and emblematic. So I created something starkly black-and-white. Then I added the red lips. Susan and her management liked the image so much that, besides running several more ads (the second image is one of the follow-ups; hence the added type just above and below her face), they proceeded to use it for all of the promotional material on her tour. Which is a pretty unusual path for a lowly newspaper ad to take, ending up on posters and t-shirts.

advertising design, newsprint

2007-06-29T09:12:00.000-07:00

This full-page ad (back cover) is very typical of the kind of music-related advertising design I did at Uptown magazine. (Scanned from a PMT, so excuse the slight roughness.)

advertising design, newsprint

2007-06-29T08:41:00.001-07:00

This is a full-page (tabloid), inside-back-cover ad from Uptown magazine. I put it in my portfolio because of the story behind it ...

Fifteen minutes before going to press (and this is back in the day of pasted-up flats being physically delivered to the printer, marking a point-of-no-return in terms of changes), a client pulled their full-page advertisement. Our PR person jumped at the chance to use the now 'free' space to promote a movie premiere but she didn't even have a press package yet, just some passes to a free screening.

"That's it?" I asked.

"Of course not," she said. "The movie's tagline is 'I am the law'. Do something with that."

So I printed out a ten-point-high letter "I", blew it up to a dozen inches or so in successive photocopies, scanned it, used it with the image from the movie pass (doing my best to remove to heavy linescreen), plus some space-conscious type, and made an ad. In about six minutes.

editorial illustration

2007-06-29T06:46:00.001-07:00

This doomed figure of law enforcement appeared with my story Dead Motorcycle Cops in the Shame Issue (Fall/Winter 2005, No.11) of Kiss Machine.

editorial illustration

2007-06-29T06:32:00.000-07:00

This illustration appeared with my story The Prince (Sometimes You're Dying) in Issue 94 of The New Quarterly. The story, built around sub-headings taken from Machiavelli's The Prince, is about a pair of ill-starred twins.

editorial illustration

2007-06-29T06:13:00.001-07:00

This illustration appeared with a story of mine (follows, below) in the second issue of Zeugma, a literary magazine out of Newfoundland.

Pinch Me

It is morning and they are moving. Still moving. He opens his eyes to windshield-flattened light, to Saskatchewan in spring, on the horizon all around is a colossus of sky, pressing down, seconds awake and he already feels it, hates it, this Biblical immensity without a puff of cloud, where trees stand strangled, twisted into the ground and telephone poles lean guilty like crosses in the ditches.

His wife, Rachel, is driving. It makes him sore to think that thought, to see the words in his head. Sore and suddenly sharpened. “Do you know where you’re going?” he asks, looking out on the highway, to its diminishing point of oblivion. On the seat between them is a hand-drawn map, a crooked red star marked Auntie Della’s.

“And good morning to you,” she sings back.

Most unconvincingly. Trying to bluff him out, he knows her in an instant. Still, he clears his throat, waits for a few seconds, keeps his voice low and casual. “You know where you’re going, eh?”

She is picking her words, pushing her chin. “I think so,” she says. Tries to smile but it’s all little quivers.

He leans over to see the gas gauge. “Oh, that’s comforting,” he says. “You think so and we’re on a secondary highway in the middle of nowhere with only half a tank. I knew this trip would be a disaster.”

“You’re the one who fell asleep,” she tries to say firmly. “I’ve been driving all night.”

“You should have pinched me, then. That would’ve been a hell of lot better than trusting in one of your I-think-so’s.” His thoughts stop at the sight of a broken fox on the shoulder, a paw bent in the air. He listens to tires droning on pavement, buzzing in currents, zippering up and down his skin. A smirk spreads across his face. “You know what I want to do someday?” he starts. “I want to write a book called She Thinks So: All the Times That Rachel Has Been Wrong. Would you like to hear some chapter titles? I’ve got: Bad Movies That Rachel Thought Might Be Good from Looking at the Box; Television Shows Inexplicably Moved From Their Regular Time Slot Because Rachel Says So; Famous People Prematurely Declared Dead by Rachel; Rachel’s Corrected World History; Rachel vs Revenue Canada; That Looks Easy To Make and Other Furniture Ideas ...”

“Well, if I’m so bad then why don’t you just leave me?” Rachel blurts, leaning in with both hands tight on the wheel, when she turns to face him it is with full tears and fluttering eyes. Hurt leaks out of her in slipping beads, crooked lines of mascara. “Well? Why don’t you just leave me then?”

He sits and stares. Well, he thinks, well, there are a couple of reasons. Like this girl named Laura, she’s one reason, one of those reasons that eventually stands for everything, you’d never guess to look at her, this young girl like a pop song in his head, so small and shy and peeky-cute, short bangs bookish glasses, nineteen or twenty at the most, reminded him of a teacher he had way back in elementary, this teacher this beautiful young teacher in her Nana Mouskouri glasses she used to love sneaking up on you – boo! gotchya! – could catch you scared in the middle of playground sunshine, grab you quick by both shoulders so you’d shriek and spin away. She smelled so good so like youth like the fresh morning air. And this girl named Laura smelled like that, too. Like sweaters and fall leaves. She was a student working in the front office for the summer, a nice girl, the kind of girl who carries around a sketchbook, it stuck out from the bag beside her desk, hey let’s have a look he said, as her supervisor it was only natural that he took an interest, try to open her up a little, promote some social interaction, he only asked her the usual questions about school and family, at the end that remark about the way families drive us crazy, okay that one was calculated but that was also the point where they connected, where he saw her face change like a chemical reaction. So it was okay. She had her own small stories, all the usual examples of bad and exotic fruit in the family tree, cartoonish sketches to prove it. It was a laugh. Nothing weird about it. He told her that everyone thinks their family is crazy, really they’re normal compared to what’s out there, so what if her uncle used super glue to fill his cavities or her little brother slept in a Halloween costume, my dad liked to sleep in the back seat of an old car that was on blocks in the backyard he said, all year round, I’m not kidding, he ran a chord out for a space heater and whiskey did the rest. They were sharing things, he and Laura, he talked to her like an equal, why shouldn’t he? They were something like friends. So he started offering her a ride home, and they had these great talks, she was really quite mature, and yeah, sure, there was some kind of pressure building inside him, deep pressure, but it took a dozen trips before it all spilled out, before he told her where he really wanted to take her but the issue of trust was a dead-end in the back alley that day, his hands were clean good breath too but she looked at him like something with its guts torn out, big crashing eyes he didn’t really understand, maybe she was just overwhelmed, believe me I feel the same way he said, sometimes he wanted things from life so badly as to rend his heart like gushing fruit. But she wasn’t listening. She was afraid. And then screaming, Don’t ever try that again I mean it I mean it!, if she hadn’t jumped out he didn’t know what he would have done to shut her up. And all the next morning he waited in his office for the police to come and beat him with night sticks, kick him in the nuts put guns to his head but they never came, this girl named Laura just showed up and sat at her desk, hunched silent and not looking, continued sitting there all summer long silent so silent with her power to destroy him. So that was one reason, this girl named Laura, named TERROR right at the front of his brain. You could also call her THE END OF EVERYTHING. Never mind the rest of them, the way they parted as he passed them in the halls, weak and wandering smiles. One day in particular he swore he heard something vicious with laughter but when he walked into the lunchroom they all went quiet, like his face was cancer, looking at the walls. So there was reason number two. Among others. Too many others. And there was no need to tell Rachel about these reasons, no reason to dredge them up, those gaping jaws of discovered skeletons fresh from the black earth. No one needed to see that, not now, not ever.

Keep moving, his mother always told him. You have to keep moving. Good advice. Women were the most incredible, fantastic, optimistic creatures, but you had to learn to navigate, to move around them.

He places a hand on the back of Rachel’s neck, rubs a thumb over fine blonde hair, feels her move every so slightly. He is slow and careful when he finally speaks: “I could never leave you, Rachel. I could never do that. I love you.”

one portfolio ... on its way

2007-06-28T13:15:00.001-07:00

As an exercise in self-reflection ... not advised.