The Secret History

This was competition brief for Penguin to design a book cover for 'The Secret History' by Donna Tartt. The design had to appeal to a new generation of readers, to be conceptual and diverse. I took main themes from the book and translated them into one image. I constructed this micro set to represent the insular nature of the group of main characters.  The six figures contained in their own world, with language and academic intonations controlling their every move. I used monotone to reflect the dark and sinister overtones that are present in the tone of the novel.

Internal Monologue

Inspired by the writing style of Bret Easton Ellis, my 'plan your life' piece reflected my love of reading and displayed my running commentary on how I would like my life to turn out. Each individually crafted spine shows a part of my monologue, together they form the entire plan. Each book in the stack essentially becoming the 'novels' of my life.

This piece was used as publicity for the 2009 D & AD New Blood exhibition, and was included in a 'Ones To Watch' feature in Digital Arts Magazine (August, 2009).

The Beauty Of Language

The concept of beauty is an age old thing. Stemming from the properties of the divine proportion, beauty is intrinsic and can be found in everything. 

From this starting point, I started looking at beautiful things, but I didn't want to go down the shallow route of looking at physical beauty. So I went deeper, and started looking at the beauty of language. I chose phrases from classic poems and displayed them as large scale typographic banners. The type is hand drawn from the typefaces Garamond and Futura (both of these typefaces were designed with the divine proportion in mind). I found hand drawing the type to be an intrinsic part of the project, as beauty is relative and there is perfection in the imperfections that life offers us. Each banner could be used as exhibition graphics, or as exhibition pieces. 

Cultural Exchange

Created for the 'Exchange of Cultural Spaces' exhibition in Hamburg, and in collaboration with an advertising student. The poster represented what we thought of the cultural exchange. Our decision to let visitors make their own opinions came from the fact that every culture has different views on different subjects. The premise is that a visitor to the exhibition takes a post-it note and discusses one of the three suggested cultural topics. The post-it is then stuck onto the blank canvas, thus creating the cultural exchange.

Experiment. Invent. Discover.

Essence is described as the intrinsic nature or indispensable quality of something or someone.

The purpose of this brief was to capture the essence of a given historical person. My person was Christopher Wren, the architect, scientist and astronomer. I chose to split his essence into three parts, being heart, mind and soul. Whilst Wren's soul was primarily dedicated to architecture, his mind was of a scientists and his heart was an astronomers. I created a three piece poster that peeled back these layers of his essence. To accompany the project, I created a booklet that gave my opinions on some of his well loved designs. 

Layer 1 

Layer 2

Layer 3

Booklet sample page

Don't Save Time. Waste It. Recycle.

Time is obsolete, it passes by and is lost. But it also stretches before us and last forever.

   This brief asked to create an exhibtion piece on the concept of time. I chose to do this from a topical point of view. In the world today, recycling is an important part of preserving the world. My premise was that by wasting time making the effort to sort out recyclable items from everyday rubbish, we would therefore be saving time for the world in the long run. A broken clock amongst the unsorted rubbish representing the time wasted.