I had the very lovely honour of designing Cliona and Paul’s wedding invites. I created a set of acrylic stamps for them to customise every paper-related aspect of their wedding. Hard work but everything had a nice, hand-applied feel to it. It was one of best weddings I’ve been to; a supercool gospel choir, lovely folks at our table, tear-inducing heart-felt speeches, a gorgeous setting and a great atmosphere. And they also happen to be some of the most talented people I know. Good luck for the future you two!
Street Feast is a brilliant concept. It’s one day in the year where neighbourhoods across Ireland host a lunch in their streets, local parks or front gardens. It’s a great excuse to share good food and meet interesting people who live nearby.
Samuel and the Street Feast team asked us to help them get the word out so I developed a friendly, illustrative look and feel, a custom typeface and a downloadable guide to running your own feast. If you’re in Ireland hop along to streetfeast.ie and join the party on the 18th July.
I got contacted in January by Lowe Roche (a lovely Canadian design agency) to help them create some hand-lettered 6 sheet ads for the Pawsway center in Toronto.
I love hand-lettering illustration jobs and this was a great job to work on. I do get through a heck of a lot of paper and ink. I’ve been working with a brush I bought in NYC that uses regular ink cartridges. I’d be lost without it.
We (Atto) hosted a sugru HACKquarium on Tuesday night at the Black Box and invited 40 chums to come and hack their old stuff better. We’ve been working with Jane (sugru inventor) for about 3 – 4 years now and we’re totally in love with the product. They’re the best people in the world to work with too. Long live sugru.
I got commissioned for a lovely job to create some custom hand lettering for cookie packaging for a big supermarket chain. I love these types of jobs. Unfortunately the client chose to go down the photographic route but I still like what I sent so here it is.
If you’re a bit of word geek like me (I have a file for collecting good words – sad but true) then I hope you’ll love Artwiculate. It’s a twitter-based Word of the Day competition that helps clever people look clever and helps the rest of us learn new words.
Pete came up with the idea at the start of summer and we teamed up with coding ninja, Stuart to make it all work. It’s early days yet, we just launched it this week but so far people seem be enjoying it. I love it when a good plan works out.
Follow @artwiculate on Twitter to play along and celebrate your inner word geek.
I’m so excited and and very proud to present the Good Little Company. We’ve been working with the lovely bunch at Finnebrogue over the past couple of years to create a new brand of super-sausages for families.
I could waffle all day about this but to cut a long story short, they’re the best sausages you could buy (85% outdoor bred pork, no artificial nasty chemicals, gluten-free, the list goes on) AND we’ve worked out a great plan with Christian Aid so that every time you buy one pack of Good Little Sausages, someone in a country like Malawi gets a meal every day for 2 weeks.
We worked on every part of the brand which was so satisfying to create a really complete look and feel. The characters are actually a bit of a spin off from the Bark Nugget animals I used to draw in art college. I even got to produce an animation to show off Meal for a Meal. We’re so chuffed, this is the best job we’ve got to work on in a long time and we get to make a bit of a difference in the actual real world!
Go look and join the Facebook group or follow the Twitter and the Good Little Company will donate a meal on your behalf. Even better – go buy the sausages in Tescos (they’re great with mash and onion gravy).
This is something we’ve been working on for a long time now and we’re pretty excited. We love the thought of spreading the Mrs P joy in classrooms around the world (cheesy I know). If you’re a teacher or a parent, please spread the word. Get on the forums and start chatting. Mrs Pancake’s ever-so 2.0 – you can find her on Facebook and Twitter too.
Just a quick note to let you know about our wee project for Kiva (Kiva is the world’s first person-to-person micro-lending website, you can lend directly to unique entrepreneurs in the developing world – it’s a super cool charity that we want everyone to know about)
We’re great believers that “the best place to store food is in someone else’s stomach” so we came up with Build a Beard Workshop. You’ll see for yourself, but basically for everyone who posts a picture of themselves with one of our free beards, we’ll put $1 in a Kiva account, probably forever.
If it’s massively successful, we’ll try to find other partners to match fund, or to make sure that the money stays in Kiva forever, but we shall see. It’d be lovely if you could do yourself a beard and post it! Plus if you have a blog, stick it up and we’ll link to you – help us go bankrupt and spread the word ;-)
We’re back! The jollies were super duper fun but I’ll tell more about that later. We got some great news while we were away. The BBC have given us the page impressions stats of the Sesame Tree website and it looks like it’s making a lot of people smile. Here’s some figures to ponder over:
April 14,654
June 253,232
August 2,662,160 (wowees)
We worked so hard on all the illustration and animation and we’re chuffed to bits that it’s a big winner. Big thanks to the lovely folks at FRONT and BBC NI for collaborating on this.
If you happen to be passing through Galway at the weekend you might stumble upon the 20th annual Galway Film Fleadh. The festival promotes and screens some of the very best in new and classic Irish and world cinema. Including the premiere of an animation called A Wonderful Story we did a while ago which is finally seeing the light of day now.
It started life as a book written by our good friend and client, John Mooney. I did the illustration and design for it and John loved it so he asked me turn it into an animation. The books and dvds have just been released into schools as part of the NI curriculum.
The great thing is that the project donates all profits towards the prevention of suicide in Ireland.
I have to admit that I can’t go to the screening because I’ll just cringe so much at everyone looking at my work. Is that bad? My toes curl thinking about it. EEK! Its all very very exciting though and I’m so glad all the hard work is worth it. If you ask me very nicely I’ll send you link to watch it online ;-)
Not so long ago our friends at Mammoth commissioned me to create a set of monster characters to promote Dekko’s big summer sale. This was a FUN job. The media buy was huge and Martin, Emma and Barry appeared on billboards around every corner in Belfast which is all very exciting if you’re me. Here’s a few snaps of the Dekko monster team.
I was doing some monster characters for a billboard campaign today and this friendly chap was part of my sketches but he didn’t make the final cut. I love him though, I think he’s my fave. He looks like a Yannick.
Big love and hugs to Ben & Sarah Behzadafshar :-)
