OCS Annual Report

It's been busy recently. Really busy in fact. As well as doing some interesting graphic design projects from my base here in Harrogate, I have also been helping out at agencies in Leeds and also on t'other side of Harrogate. The days have been long, sometimes the weekends have been interrupted by design jobs too, but it's been good fun.

Attached here is an example of an annual report that we designed for OCS (feel free to click on the image for a better view). It was a great project to be involved with - a really satisfyingly chunky piece of work that came with a suitable budget to do it justice. It allowed us to use nice (largely stock) photography, use a fifth special colour in the printing process and make use of a nice paper stock. Myself and Tim Moat worked on the design side, while Richard Spencer was the wordsmith - I think we made a great team.

The process was a relatively smooth one too, and once the job had been signed off and gone to print, I worked on an interactive pdf version. We obviously knew this was going to be a requirement, so when I set up the initial templates and style sheets, I created some navigation buttons on a hidden layer in InDesign that could be activated at a later stage. There was some additional navigation to manually create too, mainly from the contents page, as the size of the overall document meant that it was spread over several InDesigns 'books' that were stitched together later on.

All in all, it was a great graphic design job to work on, and I am delighted with the end result.

As ever, music and design have been working in sweet harmony. I recently saw Gruff Rhys (of Super Furry Animals fame) do a great gig at Harrogate Theatre. It was suitably weird, brilliant, unpredictable and enjoyable. Next up I'm off to see Miles Hunt (of Wonderstuff fame) play a gig in Carlisle (I'm a bit of a sucker for all things Stuffies), and then it's Fleet Foxes in Leeds later on in the year. Fab!

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