Movember

reject kid pics mosaic thing

Little kids do all these paintings at home and preschool, which is fun and nice, but they don’t really look any good, they tend to slap it on and walk away, until they get a bit older. So parents build up these thick piles of pictures building up in storage purgatory, putting off the inevitable guilty biffing in the bin.
We made this one in about half and hour, from our 3 year-old’s dabbles, with a hexagon template about 12cm across. It works if you choose interesting intersections of colour and tone and texture. The shapes are tacked on the wall.

Good work, Alex

I’m lucky enough to have some old school exercise books. This one, a Warwick 1N, with “spelling” on the front, was I think from 1978.
Mostly, it’s pretty dull stuff: lists of words, we went to the pool, that sort of thing. But there is nice entertainment in the sentences: made-up facts, dead birds, neat concrete concepts and structures, and great naivety.

Nor’west Zephyr

I made this for a local comic book compilation called Dud Comics. Click pic to see full (~500kb).
It was also a nice chance to do a bit of a storyboard for an animation I have been plotting for awhile featuring an old gent from rural Canterbury, stoicism, wind, and a Mark II Zephyr.

Hipstagram

Are your photos a little bit too … okay already? Check out Hipstagram – a fun and quirky way to express your individuality through blurry discolored photos. Just buy an iPhone and feign analog processes. It’s free!
[idea thanks to Nathan]

… for the trees

I made these Christmas cards thanking supporters of the Otago Children’s Autism Support Group.

awful logos

I whipped up this really bad logo for the fun, irreverent How Low Can Your Logo? competition. Their brief is a great piece of fiction – a wonderfuly, madly-named company Excellencico needs a logo which does … everything, and says nothing.

Entries range from Comic Sans and fluro DIY design disasters, to Enron jokes, to pimped-out aggressive corporate shiny nonsense, which you see here.

The bible on creating this nonsense has to be eNormicom: a fantastic satirical piece of dot-com era branding. A must for all ol-school corporate design clients.

You can check out nice online galleries on voice balloon logos, or swoosh logos, or smiley logos, or generically Web 2.0 logos, and so on, etcetera. All of which work as pretty nice mini-essays on aesthetics and communication, and how organisations think that they should represent themselves.