I gave this picture a tinge of the surreal by comping in a dramatic sky, with rays of light illuminating the scene.

I was the creative lead on this interesting set of projects for Wachovia. As part of their user experience team, I worked with information architects and usability engineers to create a new set of online banking tools. One of the challenges of these projects was to ensure that whatever visuals I came up with would would fit in with the company’s existing online visuals, but still stand out enough to draw users’ attention.

Along with the visual work, I spent a large portion of my time consulting on the design of the user interactions themselves, and developing the layouts on the basis of iterative user tests.

These projects are now complete, but still not in the public domain—so no visuals yet. Contact me for more detail on the role I played.

Whipped up in the fever surrounding the US elections of 2008, I was commissioned to design this logo for a local coffee shop. My original thought was to pay a subtle homage to the ‘Vote for Pedro’ t-shirts that have so successfully (and sometimes annoyingly) pervaded US society since the release of Napoleon Dynamite, and have the logo read ‘Vote for Paddy’. However, the owner of the coffee shop (Paddy, oddly enough) preferred the moniker ‘Vote for Paddy’s’, and so it was. I incorporated the company’s existing logo (featuring a mug of joe), and added an easily identifiable (if slightly literal) V-for-victory sign with obligatory stars and stripes.

I designed two colour options: one a little more classy and sleak (shown on the mug), and the other a little more brash (below). The two-colour option won the race.

This treatment makes no bones about brand repetition: with the name of the shop mentioned three times in relatively small space, I’d imagine that the happy mug owner isn’t likely to forget where their coffee’s coming from.

I designed the following theme for the company’s festive season campaign – the brief was to stay within the company style guidelines while still imparting a holiday feel. To achieve this, I added snow caps to the smaller product areas, and ran the instore decor background (a snowy mountain scene) throughout. Also, I created contours around the bottoms of all the product shots to give the impression that they were sitting in the snow.

The page below is a ‘gone fishing’ page – I wanted to keep it as simple and underdesigned as possible so that, when a visitor was redirected to it, they would be immediately aware on the most visceral visual level that this page was a placeholder for the main site (before they even managed to read the message stating that this was in fact the case, and that the site was out of action for whatever reason).

How originality is defined could play a part in trying to understand this pursuit. Saying that something is original only if it has never, ever been done before presents a tall order for those trying to attain it. Our brains are constantly filtering, processing, integrating and discarding stimuli from the whirlwind of inputs we receive on a daily basis. So, when you come up with your masterpiece, never before seen upon this good earth, you can be sure that your baby is to a greater or lesser degree composed of a pot pourri of cognitive fragments, all stored in your head after you’ve observed things on a conscious or sub-conscious level. Certainly, its conception is quite unlikely to be as immaculate as you think (although I’m not saying it isn’t great!)

So the point at which something is considered to be original could be seen to exist on a smooth continuum, and where this threshold occurs depends very much on the opinions and experiences of the people involved (observers and creators). Perhaps this is more realistic, rather than going for the binary and occasionally damning ‘yes it is/no it isn’t’ approach. (Although it’s important to note that the word ‘original’ is very much an either/or word—but that’s down to symantics. Maybe we need a new word!)

One thing is certain though: The quest for originality is a Very Good Thing, and quantum leaps in thinking keep the world moving and people’s brains ticking. Perhaps a better understanding of how we come to consider something original or not will help us fashion more pleasing and useful things (in whatever medium they may occur).

This neatly leads us to consider the relationship between originality and whether or not something is useful and/or pleasing. In a nutshell: “It may be one of a kind, but it sucks.” But that discussion’s for another day (and this article is long enough already).

Now that we’ve covered taking stimuli on board and committing them to memory, what’s the next step? How do we put them to use? At this point I must add that the only solid research behind this theory is my own self-monitoring, and trying to understand how I come up with new ideas, and filter my own visual bombardments. So, whether or not it applies to others I cannot tell – but taking myself as the sole guinea pig and test case, here comes my gross generalisation (and quite likely oversimplification too): In order to come up with a good idea, you have to be able to develop some sort of sensible relationship between your observational memory snippets, whether you have taken them on board conciously, or not (they all count). This process happens automatically in some cases, where an idea just seems to pop into your head. On the other hand, there are those times where have to consciously sort through all the things you remember and examples of similar work/ideas to try and spark off the process that will lead to a new story or train of thought.

I believe you need at least two things to generate these new ideas (for the purposes of this article, I’ll refer specifically to the field of visual design). The first is being open to observing your environment. I don’t mean only looking for things you think will be related to design—just anything that could become part of a narrative in one’s mind. If you are alert to looking a little deeper into the world around you, then you are bound to see more interesting and useful things (and if you are genuinely interested and involved in your field of expertise, you will automatically spot the things that are relevant to it without having to do so consciously). The second factor is an active and well-exercised mind—this is essential to ease the transition between unconnected cognitive particles* and the final, big idea. Any type of mental stimulation is good—I’d argue it doesn’t just have to be based around your area of expertise (graphic design, for example). Taking on any new challenge can only improve mental dexterity, which will ultimately enable you connect all those loose thoughts into a tangible and interesting idea. And if it just happens unconsciously, then all the better—that could indicate that your mind is in such supreme shape that it makes the connections without requiring any conscious effort (I hasten to add that this is a theory, and have no doubt this state of mental fitness would be Nirvana to any creative person out there).

All that remains it to tranform the idea into a physical design—and if you can, you should!

* Yes, I did make that one up (even though I Googled it afterwards to be sure, and found somebody else had used it to describe something quite different. So it’s still an original—it’s just not the only one). And, despite having studied psychology, I couldn’t quite find the universal term for thoughts, observations, and memories, so it was necessary to fabricate an expression. It’s terribly pompous, and the temptation to make double-quotes with both hands when saying it is overwhelming, but I promise I’ll never use it in public again.

To make the guidelines easier to access, the first part of a possible solution would be to break this monster document into manageable portions. The second part would be to give the designer contextual shortcuts to these snippets.

To elaborate: I used this approach to draw up a style guide for the creative team working on the M&S website. It was essential that designers and artworkers who were working on short-term contracts could pick up the house style quickly, so I subdivided the information in the style guide, and placed context-specific instructions in the relevant Photoshop templates, which were all clearly named to make the process of creating a template-based graphic as straightforward as possible.

While the creatives on the team still had to go through the main style guide to get a flavour for the brand, the bite-sized, contextual approach (for want of a more elegant way of describing it) saved them the time and sometimes frustration associated with referring to the large document.

There are many ways of contextualising help functions, all with their merits—use a computer, and you’ll trip over one in no time. What’s important is that the user (in this case a designer or artworker) spends time doing what they’re there for, and not stumbling over badly thought out and unclear guidelines. Just as we have an obession with making the end-user’s life easy—let’s not forget the humble and long-suffering designers who put the content there in the first place!

Contact me for more detail on these projects (much of the work may or may not have reached the public domain as yet, hence the lack of visuals. Better safe than sorry!)

The following newsletter had to communicate a lot of information in a small space, and since it had a captive audience, I was able to format the information in a less promotional, and more factual format (presenting it simply as a letter addressed to the recipient, rather than an impersonal, traditionally above-the-line communication). I used emotive photography to evoke a strong emotional response in the reader, to engage them, and ultimately take them further down the path towards making a contribution to the charity or becoming involved in other ways.

A rock painting design and ochre-based colour palette are central to the following brochure, giving it a uniquely Southern African flavour. The photographs had some strong, saturated colours, so the background was deliberately kept abstract and muted so as not to overpower the layout.

This brochure was more promotionally orientated than the previous piece, with the aim of recruiting new members—so I cut the information into manageable chunks, with a clear heirarchy and attention-grabbing headlines, to accommodate for the potentially shorter attention span of readers.

Imagine what it must be like working at a company with such a swashbuckling past, now reduced to mass-producing essentials for the hum-drum mainstream. Surely this would take its toll on somebody? (And by somebody, I mean a deranged somebody—essential for the purposes of this story.)

Would this employee pine for a forgotten era, spent folding and hammering raw steel before the scalding heat of a furnace, crafting a thing of singular perfection—a mark of an bygone culture? Would he become giddy with excitement as he contemplated sneakily removing the Aloe-vera strips and protective wires from a few razor heads, just to re-kindle that wild sense of danger and freedom?

To stretch matters to their absolute limit: I’d imagine our would-be armourer being tipped over the edge of sanity when he has to quality check the latest quadruple-edged shaving system with rich moisturising balms. Snap! He would spring from his neutered and hopeless state, inflamed with frothing delusions of becoming a sword-smith again. And of course, instead of making swords, our unfortunate anti-hero’s addled brain gets the better of him and he, tragically, becomes part of a symbolic act which involves him fatally assaulting the lantern-jawed, clean-shaven, rippling everyman who embodies every shaving ad campaign ever embarked upon.

Will the frustrated swordsman ever return to claim his territory? Will this misguided, barking Phoenix soar in the skies again? Maybe—but probably not.

To ensure that the quality of the photography was in line with the campaign’s high profile, I accompanied the photographic team to provide artistic direction.

I created sketches to guide the model—generally focusing on ‘big’ poses: Hands on hips, hooked into the belt, shot straight-on to show height and broadness of shoulders, with emphasis given to the model’s large features for close-up shots. For example, where there was a requirement for a scene-setting banner for shoes (below), rather than just showing an image of a large shoe (where the scale would be lost on screen), I included the model’s hands, pulling the laces tight, to give a sense of that scale.

To prevent the shoot from becoming overly self-conscious and the mood of the resulting frames too serious and potentially corny, I encouraged the model to smile and relax so that his good-natured personality came through in the final frames. Taking into account that he was not a professional model used to posing, shooting him in this manner yielded the best results.