Design Debate

I love any excuse to draw and I do often get the opportunity for our c lients. Being based in beautiful Cornwall makes an easy subject, one I never tire of.  Our clients Cornish Horizons have a stunning portfolio of holiday cottages based up and down our fair county, they asked if we could draw them some maps of where their offices are based to hand out to customers.  I needed to make sure these maps could actually be useful as well as pretty to look at so I marked on key roads and illustrated landmarks. Dotted with drawings and full of colour and texture, hopefully conjuring that holiday feel. They will be used as print-outs in welcome packs and available to download at the Cornish Horizons website.  We have done some really lovely projects with this client, creating tote bags, brochures, magazines, greetings cards, email marketing - even cookies and a fairground-style selfie frame!     

As you may know I am a designer at Pickle Design in Wadebridge, Cornwall. It's incredibly busy at the moment in the studio! I thought I would show you a little of what we have been up to... This is the A5 magazine brochure we created for Blueriver Cottages in Devon. I illustrated this map and laid out the spreads designing how the properties would be displayed. The idea being to create a pick-up-able guide to the area and the beautiful properties the company feature. I love seeing my work in the real world!  This is Cornish Cottage Care , a holiday home cleaning and maintenance company which we did the branding for. This was a lovely project to work on, I really enjoyed giving it a Cornish nautical feel. We take on all kinds of projects - large and small, established firms and start ups. I designed this logo for hair and beauty company Illusions . The brief was tricky - natural elements creating a face – but I think we managed to achieve it! ...

What an interesting brew - a Budapest based illustrator, a classic novel, and the modern medium of the Google map.  Lehel Kovacs has taken inspiration from Jules Verne’s novel ‘Around the World in Eighty Days' by drawing each place Phileas Fogg visited. He used the Street View provided through Google maps to capture what these locations look like today.  I like Kovacs' style of illustration too. It is sketchy and fluid, with minimal line, colour and a little texture. The buildings gaze down in a 3d fashion and people go about their everyday life obliviously caught in a ever evolving story.    

  I stumbled across cartographer Sohei Nishino on blog The Fox is Black , the scale of his work is overwhelming. Nishino takes thousands upon thousands of photographs of famous cities and compiles a collage to give an impression of the place. These areas are of course very densely populated and I think Nishino conveys this well. I just don't think I would be able to make sense of the reams of photographs he must take, quite a talent! Sohei Nishino is exhibiting in London at the Michael Hoppen Contemporary until January 2015.