Paper Installations!

My new favourite things!

Came across these deadly paper installations, first by Paper Donut, the second by Lenancker Romain via weheart.co.uk and the third by Le Creative Sweatshop, via designyoutrust.com. They're so much fun and so colourful. They have a great sense of freedom and creativity, love them!

I am not an artist

Had fun doing this little gif today for I am not an artist. It popped up on design you trust during the week so I filed it away to do at the weekend! It's curated by Soon in Tokyo, I think it's a really cool idea, like a digital version of contributing a patch to a quilt, wonder how long it'll run for?

It was done in photoshop cs4, which has a very handy animation feature. Feel like I did something productive with my Saturday now, which from the outset seemed like it was doomed to a be a hangover write-off!

Self-Indulgence!

This is a very self-indulgent post, but then that's what I guess this blog is about!

I love doing colour palettes for projects, they just give me so much satisfaction and I love looking at them for some reason (I know - NERD!). So on that note, here's one I did today for a NAIRTL marketing animation.

Lovely colours, lovely squares, satisfaction!

Visualising ELVIN

I’ve been working today on visualising the ELVIN social networking platform, the different interactions and the different tools etc that will hopefully pair learners and learners as well as learners and content. We have a skype meeting tomorrow with all partners so hopefully these will go a long way in making sure everyone knows what we’re talking about!

There’s a lot to work out but visualising the process really helps!

Here’s an example of one of the diagrams.

Pastel Portrait

Love Pastels.

This is done in oil & chalk pastels, can never make up my mind which I like more!

Steven Meisel Vogue Shots 2008

Steven Meisel seems to be popping up in my twitter feed at the moment (here and here). Reminded me of my favourite photo shoot of his for Italian Vogue (above), deadly stuff! I love the flat perspective/tapestry look of them. See more of that shoot here.


edit**** Even more Steven Meisel in my twitter! He's great.

BCO Asteroid Chaser

In DEIS we’re involved in serious games research. We designed, prototyped and piloted a game last year in partnership with the Blackrock Castle Observatory. More about it on my website here. We’re now modifying that game based on the pilot results and further feedback from the astronomers at Blackrock. My role involves designing all the graphic elements of the game and producing cut-scene and in-game animations in flash, which basically means drawing and animating spaceships and meteorites, nice one!

This storyboard panel was produced using illustrator, photoshop and poser3d. I used a nice and very simple comic book effect on the figure and the neon effect in illustrator also came in handy!

Stephen Murphy + Pierre O' Reilly

A friend just turned me on to the beautiful paintings of Stephen Murphy.

He's doing a show with Pierre O' Reilly (composer + holder of best name ever) this Friday at the fantastic Cork School of Music, should be good!

Hvass & Hannibal - Process behind "Magic Chairs"

Came across this article on Hvass & Hannibals blog on how they made the image for "Magic Chairs". It's always really interesting reading / seeing other people's processes. Plus I just love their work! It's unreal.

Portfolio Image Part Deux

My second post in a day, am I developing an addiction?!

A few weeks ago I started work on an image for the home page of my updated portfolio website. I finally got back to working on it again today/tonight. The last version I did turned out really flat so this time round I did a number of the components with oil pastels, scanned them all (with my really slow scanner...) and layered them up in photoshop, this isn't finished at all, but I definitely prefer this direction...

Le Cirque Photoshoot for NY Times (Solve Sundsbo + Anne Christensen + Gary Card)

Came across this fab photoshoot on Gary Card's blog. Love the colours, shadows, mime poses and mad "hair furniture" I think it's called?! All deadly anyway.

See more here and here.

Beautiful Spanish Architecture

So still slightly obsessed with all things Spanish after my trip last weekend, I came across this STUNNING work of architecture on thecoolist.com. It's incredibly understated, pure and functional. It's also very intelligently designed, carrying the Azahar Group's green agenda throughout all aspects of the building. See more here and here.


This second image is of a canoe shed in Andalucia, one of the loveliest sheds i've ever seen! It really reminds me of the Azahar building, beautifully simple clean shapes and perfectly complementary to it's surroundings. See more on weheart.co.uk.

Mira Schendel + ELVIN Meeting

I'm just back from the ELVIN tech meeting in Madrid, it went well. We're basically designing, developing and piloting a system that uses social networks to teach language, we're at the very start of the project so loads of work to do yet!

Yesterday morning I was lucky enough to have some down time so I went to Reina Sofia, Madrid's modern art museum. It was a great way to spend a morning, stunning building filled with beautiful art. At the moment they have an exhibition of work by Mira Schendel and Leon Ferarri which I LOVED! Here's one of my favourite pieces from it, beautiful sense of light and delicacy, lovely arrangement of shapes/space as well. Letters are fundamentally abstract, but text itself allows very little room for abstraction, ie words have subscribed meanings, the re-abstraction of text here into graphic motifs to create refined and delicate compositions is captivating. It gives me an idea for a new portfolio website, which is typical because I just got a new one up online! It also makes me really want a letraset...

***edit*** Came across this really good post regarding some of the thought processes behind Schendel's work.