Spectrum

I have recently helped sound and broadcast company 'Spectrum' come up with a new brand identity. It had to suit the high end market they were aiming for aswell as target the typical male audience that would visit the site. I came up with 11 or 12 ideas and luckily ones of those was chosen straight away, meaning I could perfect the icon and get the files to the client swiftly.

Client testimonial;

"I had been after a graphic designer, to create a new logo for my company for some time, though none could really put what I needed onto paper to meet my needs or tastes. From the outset design brief I knew I was in good hands with Ben. After a quick chat about the company, he created a logo which fitted nicely with our client base and with a great turnaround time. Ben turns thoughts into vision - Needless to say we are very happy with the results and will be using him again in the future."

Illustration

Illustration is massively calming for me and something I could happily do all day. I mainly use watercolours and an ink and nib do draw as I love the 'grimey' bleeding colours and dirty splats that often at a glance look horrible but I feel give emotion to a piece. Here are a few sketches for various old projects I thought I would upload incase anyone needing some drawings wanted to have a look at what I can do

Typeradio

I received a brief to transcribe an interview from Type Radio on Bruce Connew and had to create two double page spreads ready for print on indesign. In his interview he discusses his experience with apartheid, war and politics. On the subject of politics he states that 'not everything is black and white', which I thought would be an interesting avenue to explore visually. This is the result of much experimentation with editorial illustration, layouts, grids and colour. Every character in the header is ever so slightly under or over the baseline grid, which originally was developed after a mistake I made during a critique half way through the project. I think it adds character and makes a slightly rebellious statement whilst not being completely off the wall, not unlike the subject matter of the article.

Currriculum Vitae

I have been making custom made C.V's to send to creative agencies to see if they would take me on for some work experience or even a summer internship. I wanted to create something that would be seen by as many people in the office as possible and hopefully make people go 'hm, thats a good idea'. I though about making a box of tea bags with my info on the sides so that hopefully everyone in the office making tea would see my name and details. I then changed this idea to a chocolate box with the idea that I might get passed around, getting my name out there. I also made a serious one on my teachers recommendation so that I could also appeal to companies that might not appreciate a 'gimicky' one. I used the background and styles from a magazine layout I had recently created as I thought it would work well and help to make the information as clear as possible. I also put a tab on the side so that if it was filed with other A4 sheets of paper it would stick out.

Music

I have been doing a lot of work for some of my friends I have back in Somerset. Some of them have set up an events organisation company called 'Skanky Sounds' to provide people in the area with a place to go to listen to music. They are trying to make a difference in their community by encouraging people to get together and make music, become lighting or stage engineers, or just generally help out to make something out of nothing. Through doing work for them I have been contacted regularly by dj's and mc's looking for logos, vinyl artwork etc...

Roomsix

I started roaming around Bournemouth finding bars and clubs that looked like they needed help with their promotional material and gave them my contact details. Eventually RoomSix called me and asked if I could do 7x 2ft/4ft posters to fill their windows with information. So I got to work. In the end I was just following orders as closely I could and so as a piece of design I don't imagine it winning any awards, but I think they do the job as they are loud, colourful and informational.

Animation

The brief for this project was to create a short animation based on statistics of our choice. After much research I found staggering facts about the American health care system and thought that visually I could create something nice base on this theme. I was watching a lot of Digital Kitchens work at the time and really wanted to create something that would impress them as someday I would love to join their team. The quality of the final piece is fairly poor due to shoddy equipment and the fact that I have never done this sort of thing before. But the ides are there.

Barcelona 2009

I went to Barcelona last year with my National diploma group from Bath college and was given the brief to document the whole trip in a way that was personal to our own experience. After walking endlessly around the city and noting the general dislike towards us as English as well as the dodgy looking blokes out to try and rob you of everything, we spent a lot of our evenings in the hotel room drinking and playing poker. So my idea was to produce my own range of 'Barcelona' beers complete with illustrations on the labels of various landmarks from around the city. I also created a promotional poster for the beer which was based on a 'Desperados' poster that I fell in love with at the time.

Photography

A selection of my best photographs from 2008-2009


Beachy Head, West Sussex

Studio shot/Bath Abbey

Lulworth Cove, Dorset

Seven Sisters, West Sussex

Westminster, London

This blog was originally created to document my progress through the Visual Communication course I am doing at university. I have decided that this will now be primarily for my work outside uni under the pseudonym 'Obscene_design' and maybe a few of my best pieces from the uni course. I'll put up a link soon for the new one which will be for recording just my uni work.


Anyway, this is a piece I created a while back to enter into one of the Don't Panic poster design competitions. The title for the submission was 'Feminism' so I set out to create something that would represent power and beauty whilst looking like something that people would be happy to have hanging on their walls. Unfortunately I didn't win thanks to my lazy friends and associates failing to vote due to the 'whopping' 30 seconds of their time they would have had to donate, but I still managed to get into the top ten which was good.