Bit more Inspiration

As promised from the last blog, I have attached a few 'live' photos from Acceleris's 'Inspiration Station' room in all it's glory. The results look even better now that the furniture is in place too, particularly as some of the colours from the graphics are picked out in the colour of the tables, stools and bean bags. It's nice to see the room being well used by folk as well - and there's even a quick poker lesson laid out on the blackboard wall - brilliant!!

Other work continues apace including one or two other projects for Acceleris (including a nice chunky tabloid magazine) and some new projects for Beaucare Medical.

I've also had the opportunity to work with my old mate Mark Frudd (http://www.markfrudd.com/) on a project, which has been nice. He's a very talented illustrator and is creating a gorgeous map of Harrogate to drop into a supplement for Acceleris. If you get the chance, I'd highly recommend checking out his stuff.

Inspirational music on the Howabout hifi recently has largely been provided by The Pogues, The Charlatans, Nick Drake, The Libertines and Dinosaur Jr. Niiiiice

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Inspiration Station

Creativity continues apace at Howabout Creative Solutions in Harrogate, and recently my graphic design exploits have seen me tackle some large format designs for Acceleris Marketing Communications (based in Harrogate town centre). I was asked to help make a slightly plain breakout room a little more inspiring and thought provoking for the staff. Somewhere they could take a break, eat their lunch, brainstorm ideas, and was generally more welcoming than the existing room.

A meeting with Peter Davenport resulted a nice free-thinking brief for me, with a free-reign to be creative. We wanted to room to be both engaging and interactive. The approach was to have a mixture of interesting typography, more sympathetic lighting and areas where staff could display thoughts and ideas. We decided a good solution would be a corkboard for pinning, well anything really... nice flyers, postcards, magazine articles, bits of packaging - anything. This was surrounded with appropriate words in the form of a word cloud ('Liked It', 'Blogged It', 'Tweeted It', 'Shared It' etc) and the results looked really effective.

Another wall was given a blackboard paint treatment for the 'old-school' way of communicating ideas. I thought it would make a nice contrast to the modern day method of using computers/email/twitter/blogs to get ideas across. A bit more typography skirting the blackboard wall with a nice branch silhouette image (a nod towards the notion of acorns to great oaks) made for a black/white contrast (with a touch of zingy green too) that worked well.

Appropriate quotes adorned another wall and the window, with a nice wave illustration across one of the large window panes. The wave had an added (and unexpected) bonus of casting a brilliant shadow across the window sill when the sun shone.

Funky ball lights, a floor lamp and some wire frame wall art completed the designs, and I was delighted with the results. Peter sourced some brightly coloured bean-bags, stools and other bits and pieces of furniture and hopefully the transformation is now complete (I haven't yet seen the furniture in situ).

What I have attached here are the visuals we worked from. They are pretty accurate to the finished article, and as soon as I can I will photograph the finished room and post the photos here. It was a great graphic design project to be involved in, really enjoyable and I got a great buzz from it. I think it was because of the fairly instant nature of it - the results came together quickly and I could see the whole concept developing over the course of 24 hours. I love it when a plan comes together!

(Music on the day of installation was provided by an eclectic mix of Jesus and Mary Chain, Beach Boys, Libertines, Chemical Brothers, Gorillaz, Nirvana, Beatles and The Clash). Well, you can't work in total silence can you!?

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Another busy week, Deer Shed and just stuff

I'm pleased to say it's been non-stop on the graphic design front recently. I've been doing some really exciting stuff for Acceleris in Harrogate, as well as exhibition stands and marketing material for YorkTest Laboratories. Add to that the continuing branding work for Elegant Interiors (also of Harrogate) and pitching for a variety of new work and its meant there are often not enough hours in the day.

Tomorrow brings a rare day out of the office, as a quick dash to The Lakes is required before I'm back in front of the Mac on Friday.

Last weekend's weather was amazing (hopefully a sign of things to come) and we took full advantage with a brilliant picnic with friends in Valley Gardens (always reminds me of Hampstead Heath in miniature, that place).

Continuing the kiddie friendly theme, I must remember to buy tickets for the fab sounding Deer Shed festival, which bills itself as a family friendly festival. The past two years have seen us make the pilgrimage to Glastonbury, which my daughter loves (wish I'd done my first festival aged three!) but as that isn't an option this year, Deer Shed seems like a worthy substitute.

Anyway, hopefully the next blog post will have a few tasters of the graphic design bits I have been working on, but for now they are under wraps.

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Work, Wharfedale, Weekends

Hello Monday... it's been a really busy couple of weeks for Howabout Creative Solutions and we have been putting our graphic design skills to good use in and around Harrogate, Wetherby and Tockwith.

I have been working on location at Creative Farm, Kariba and Wish Agency as well as continuing to work with the wonderful Acceleris Marketing Communications and creating a new logo for Elegant Interiors (interior design) in Harrogate. On top of that, work continues with YorkTest Laboratories and Clive Sutton cars. And that's just the way I like it - keeping busy, making brilliant new contacts and working on a host of graphic design projects.

Yesterday was a lovely day too - not only celebrating Mother's Day with my beautiful wife and daughter, but also my wife's birthday too. We took a drive up to Burnsall in Wharfedale and then walked by the river to Appletreewick for a nice pub lunch. I love Appletreewick - the views from the Craven Arms pub are magnificent and the cruck barn there is gorgeous. It tickles me that Appletreewick is where Ben Kelly hails from as well - the designer who created in the interior of the legendary Hacienda club in Manchester. From a quaint Dales village to the steel, glass and iron interior of an inner city club. Amazing!

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Spring has sprung...

It's been a glorious few days in Harrogate (both weather wise, and work wise). It was an action packed weekend too, which included a trip to the wonderful Harrogate theatre to see the fabulous Charlie and Lola. It was fab too - made we wish I was a kid all over again. Hats off to both Lauren Child for creating such a cool series of children's books, and to the creators of the stage show - I was very impressed (as you can probably tell).

It's been a busy old working week too (and it's only Wednesday). I've been doing some pitch work with my old colleague Richard Spencer which looks really good; quoted for a couple of new pieces of work for YorkTest Laboratories (which is always nice); and have been creating some rather nifty logo's for a new client (name to be revealed shortly). On top of that I had a really productive meeting in Wetherby (actually it was just outside if the truth be told) which could lead to another exciting new chapter in the life of Howabout Creative Solutions. Not bad for a little graphic design set up that has only been in operation for less than a year!

In fact, the only blot on this week has been the rather flaky performance of the latest Twitter application for the iPhone. It crashed my phone once, and then refused to sent tweets or allow me to view others for two days. A reinstall eventually fixed the problem, so (touch wood) it'll be problem free from here on.

Of course all this work has meant I haven't been able to take full advantage of the recent sunny spell. It looked nice from the office window though.

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New week, new work example

Morning, and what a gorgeous Monday morning it is (I don't think it's very often I've written those words). The sun is shining in Harrogate and although the frost has melted, it's still chilly - the perfect late winter morning in fact. One of the great things about being based in North Yorkshire is the fabulous scenery on our doorstep. Yesterday we took a drive up into Wharfedale to Kilnsey Park (underneath Kilnsey Crag) where we had a lovely walk in the sun, ate great food, and caught a few trout (okay, it was in a fish farm, so it was impossible not to catch any to be fair, but the look of delight on my daughter's face when she helped me to land the first fish was priceless).

Today I thought I'd show a recent piece of work I did for Carlisle Cleaning - a bid document cover (front and back) and content page (shown here as a double page spread) for a Eurostar cleaning contract. The subject matter is pretty dry, which is why it was important to lift the document with some creative thinking. The cover echoes the Eurostar electronic noticeboards, and the lined device on the content page alludes to train tracks. Much of the document was designed elsewhere at in Microsoft Word, and my brief was to make the cover, and content stand out (I also supplied the content page to the same design in a Word format too, so that should the client wish they could input page numbers etc themselves, as the pagination wasn't finalised at this stage).

It was a nice little project to work on, and I wish them well in winning the contract.

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Acceleris and Photoshop masking

Hello. I'm a little late blogging this week, but there is a reason for that. I wanted to include a piece of work I have just done with Acceleris Integrated Communications Agency in Harrogate, and we agreed that I could showcase it on my blog on Wednesday. Today! So here it is... a little concertina fold, designed and written for a housing conference in Brighton - it highlights the many skills Acceleris possess in social housing. The cover image was originally intended for page 3, but I felt it was so strong that it should be the lead image. However, I thought it would be fun to trace around the staff members and duplicate the image on page 3 as a keyline illustration - I think it works really well too.

This is the first piece of work I have done for Acceleris and I thoroughly enjoyed the whole process. Hopefully there are opportunities going forward to work with them again. And again...

I thought I'd finish this blog with a quick 'How To' lesson in Photoshop masking. There are several ways of masking an image in Photoshop, but this one is really useful and quick, and gives really nice results.

Step 1: Open the chosen image, add a new layer and fill it with 100% solid white.

Step 2: On the white layer, add a Layer Mask

Step 3: Choose a nice big, soft edged brush (its trial and error to get the correct size, but it shouldn’t be bigger than the element of the image you are masking off, but not too small either) and make sure 100% black is the foreground colour.

Step 4: Choose an opacity of 20-40%(ish). Again this is trial and error to an extent.

Step 5: Gradually ‘paint’ over the part of the image that you want to be seen through the mask. Make sure you still have the Layer Mask selected while doing this. Because the opacity isn’t 100% (or anywhere near), the more strokes you do over a particular area, the stronger the image becomes. This is what giver the finishes product a nice soft edge though.

Step 6: Experiment. Sometimes it’s nice to include some of the background ghosting through. The more you try it, the better the results get, although its very easy to get great results from the off.

Right, that's it from me for now. I hope you find the Photoshop tip useful. I'm off for a quick run before getting back to work.

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