C-23 // Tessellation 1

I'm doing a bit of self-directed study into symmetry and tessellating patterns at the moment. I know it sounds kinda masochistic, but I'm really enjoying it. I guess it's expanding on the stuff I like to do with graph paper, plus an opportunity to explore some mathematical aspects of art and design, and an excuse to play with Adobe Illustrator.

I'm working out of an excellent book called 'Designing Tessellations' by Jinny Beyer. So far I've mostly been photocopying sheets of tiles out of the book, cutting them out and sticking them into an exercise book in various ways that demonstrate different kinds of 2-D symmetry. But today I decided to apply some of what I've learned so far and build something in Illustrator. After a couple of false starts, here's the result. I like the way the gradient fill I've used on the tiles creates a kind of psuedo 3-D effect.

C-16 // Universal Children's Audio

Universal Children's Audio (UCA) are an audio recording company that specialises in producing quality music for children. They have been around for over 20 years, and over that time have won many awards, both national and international, for the excellent products they produce. 

About 18 months ago they underwent a major re-branding and realised that many of their existing albums would need to be re-designed to fit their new brand. I already had a working relationship with them as one of their regular session musicians, but they also knew of my interest in graphic design (I am self-taught) and liked some covers I had designed previously. I was asked to begin working through their back catalog, transforming old cd covers (and even some cassettes!) into nice shiny CD packages with new updated colours and the new UCA logo and brand. New products needing cover design would also be likely to come up from time to time. Of course I was very happy to do the work as it fitted my level of skill and experience, and I have been contracting my services to them fairly regularly ever since.

Recently I've been working on two digipak covers for a brand new product range they are developing. I finished them last week and they are currently up at Stebbing getting manufactured. I'm quite proud of them, actually. I won't post them here until the albums are properly released and available, but in the meantime here's a selection of some of the other covers I have put together for UCA over the last year and a half. Remember - not all of the imagery is original or mine. In many cases I am simply cutting up existing artwork and rearranging it. In these examples there are some illustrations that I scanned and modified to suit, and there are a few stock photos/vectors too. (Just clarifying to avoid any misunderstandings!)