Book cover design

As well as being a Graphic & interactive Designer I am also a budding novelist and have completed my first, full length young adult fantasy fiction novel which I am currently revising. I created a cover to go with my book and although it is seen as not very professional to include your own artwork when submitting manuscripts I wanted to do one anyway for the fun of it.

The original idea and design came from Reece over at CFH and I have refined it and created the book name and added some colour etc. I have included the original Reece did and my near-final one to show how a design can evolve from a simple idea.

If you want to learn more visit my Creative Writing network where you can find extracts.

Initial concept:



Development:



Finished thing:

Manchester Pride 08 goes live

After a competition run by Manchester Pride to create a new brand identity was run this year the site needed sprucing up a little and here is the final outcome with fancy swirly lines, butterflies, sIFR flash replacement text and everything.
Visit the site here: www.manchesterpride.com

Font Creation Online

Amazing idea this. Back in the day at university I had a go with Fontographer and haven't really touched it since. This is similar but online. There are limited shapes so you don't have anywhere near the control you get when created characters in illustrator but it is still impressive. The tools are intuitive and the keyboard shortcuts make it feel like a desktop program. The fact you can download your typeface or view a gallery of others is a great idea. It's the equivalent of, say, Vecteezy but with a stripped down version of illustrator on the site to allow you to create the vectors there and then.

Check it out at: http://fontstruct.fontshop.com/