Royal Mail Group, print items for the Chairman's Excellence Awards

Every year The Royal Mail Group invites its staff to nominate a fellow employee for an award. The 2008 event was designed to look like a house with, for instance, themed wallpaper and carpet, a really large front door and over-sized electrical sockets.

Shown here are my initial designs for the various print items which continued the same idea – the posters featured everyday treats and rewards; the nomination form had a door on the front; the invitation had keys; the ticket had a welcome mat; the event programme featured things such as a reminder post-it on the fridge, a branded tablecloth with plates and menu, a coat stand on the prizes page, lights and lampshades for the nominees (luminaries!), and dining chairs for the judges.

Sadly, for me, a lot of these ideas were watered down by the time the job was finally artworked. The client was keen on the brown and gold stars image on the front of the programme and wanted this to be repeated wherever possible, in particular the posters, the nomination form and the ticket.

Re the internal pages of the programme, only the fridge and and the plates made it through to the final cut. I still say they could have used children's fridge magnet letters for the A-Z nominations. Ah well, what do I know?!

Athens 2004 opening and closing ceremonies

Jack Morton created and produced the opening and closing ceremonies for the Olympic Games 2004 in Athens. 1000s of photographs were taken and a selection was was put into a 220pp book called 'Ceremony' which told the story of the making of these events.

I picture edited, designed and created the layouts and artwork, based on a rough template that had already been set up. I also went to the printers to do a press pass etc.

I am really pleased final printed book, and it was hard choosing just 8 spreads to show here.

I also designed an invitation for the book launch; my idea being a 6pp concertina leaflet that could be torn along perforations to make individual postcards, one being the reply paid card acceptance card. Sad to report that the printer used perforations that were too close together and thus the things just fell apart once opened. I was SO disappointed!

Other landscape format postcards were also designed.

American Express Invitations

Two invitations for American Express events. And,top right, mocked-up at smaller sizes than the final glossy printed item, are some of the early designs for that particular event.

IBM Bangalore invitation

I was really getting into this and then the event was cancelled. Hence, these are working designs. I wanted each of the 16 A4 pages to depict some of the sumptuous colours and textures of Banaglore.

An earlier design for an event at St Andrews is here.

IBM St Andrews invitation

A 16pp A4 landscape invitational brochure to a prestigious golfing weekend at St Andrews hosted by IBM for its executives. (The images shown here are from early working artworks, not the finished product.)

I really enjoyed working on this one; the brief was to use 'traditional' yet 'uncheesy' imagery, which proved tough to source, but no-one agreed with me that it would have been a good idea if I'd gone up there and taken some photos for myself. Ah well.

I began designs on for a second event in Bangalore, India, but sadly that event was cancelled.