However, I really do hope they follow the basic plot lines that have been developed by the dozens of authors who have worked with Lucas over the years to bring us a wealth of stories set deeply within the Star Wars universe (see the timeline of Star Wars books).  I know George already has his basic ideas for movies VII, VIII and IX written down, but there are some truly magnificient stories to tell in film without doing anything crazy like bringing Darth Vader (or is it Anakin Skywalker now?) back to life.  Because frankly, that would be a feat beyond even the power of the force… his body turned to pure energy for goodness sake!

Here are just a few major plot points that I think would be fantastic to explore

• Mara Jade: The Emporer’s Hand, trained to Sith Assassin who blames Luke Skywalker for ruining her life but eventually falls for him and bears their son Ben Skywalker.
• Grand Admiral Thrawn: A stalwart of the Expanded Universe, such an amazing character, with his impressive intellect, strategy in battle and his curious fascination with the artistic history of the populations he was ordered to decimate under the Emporer.
• The search for Jedi Knights and the jedi Academy on Yavin IV: Luke’s search for other force sensitives and his quest to re-establish a Jedi Order, introducing characters like Kyle Katarn, Corran Horn and of course Leia Organa Solo, Jedi Knight.
• The Sith Artifacts and Exar Kun: The poor souls who uncover the Sith holocrons of Exar Kun and bring his force energy (like Yoda & co but only really evil) back to the world… havoc ensues!
• Han & Leia’s Twin Children: Jacen and Jaina Solo… force sensitive and trained by their uncle Luke Skywalker.
• Black Sun: The mercenary, pirate, smuggling ring of the galaxy, and everyone’s attempt to bring them down…
• Sith Luke: Luke going all dark side on our asses, and being brought back to the light by his sister.

Of course this is all speculation and rumour for now, and clearly they aren’t going to head down the New Jedi Order books series and do battle with the Yuzhan Vong, because that would just mess with the minds of most Star Wars fans, what with them not existing in the force and all that… But I still hold hope that they will do those 17 books justice one day.

In the meantime, you can do as I do and watch this page dedicated to the future of Star Wars on the official site.

Oh and I really hope they let Olly Moss or Tom Whalen design the movie posters.

The post Star Wars & the Expanded Universe appeared first on Peak Design.

I thought I’d take some time to write about what I like, what I don’t like and how I see it evolving in the future.

Initial Reactions

When I first heard about Pinterest I was pretty excited, I loved the masonry grid layout and the ease of pinning was cool.  The idea of Multiple Boards was nice, and finding new stuff and following people was dead easy.

Unfortunately there wasn’t much content for a graphic designer or web designer to look at, and I had no interest in sending my pins on to Facebook and Twitter. So I created a couple of Boards, and pinned a few things here and there, but overall I wasn’t seeing much that was of any particular interest to me…

The glory days

As interest in Pinterest ( ha! Puns….sorry ) grew, more and more designers and aspiring designers were signing up, finding cool work online and pinning it left, right and center.  Design sites were listing their takes on top people to follow and I started gobbling all this content up and adding new boards for illustration, web work and so on.

I was starting to see lot’s and lot’s of really inspiring work on Pinterest every day and the quantity was starting to make my old favourites Designspiration & Dribble take a back seat.  I was following a wider variety of people, bringing in typographers and artists as well as UI designers as well.

But as with all good things, there comes a time when the amount of quality work not on Pinterest dries up…

The beginnings of hate

Slowly but surely I started to notice that most of my feed was repetitive, people pinning things I had seen months ago (but Pinterest doesn’t know that and can’t tell… something I quite dislike about it) and also the maount of pins started to slow, I was and continue to get less and less new work in my feed every day.

The amount of new work being produced and showcased online is finite, and Pinterest has pretty much reached saturation point.  We all look at the same sites, see the same Behance, Dribble,Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and other design news sites every day.

Now that’s kind of okay, it’s a natural progression for a site like Pinterest to slow down after a  while… but I also noted a shift in content type.  I am seeing less real world design work and more and more of my pet hate work, which is someone taking a quote or some pithy piece of wording, finding an expressive font or two and whacking it into a poster and calling it design.

The way forward

I think Pinterest needs to make some pretty big changes to it’s backend systems in order to survive.

Firstly it needs to be able to know if someone has pinned a pin that was a repin of a pin that I made and not show it to me in my feed (or better yet let me choose if I want to see it).  If this kind of functionality isn’t put in place, then Pinterest will become a cyclical repeated loop of teh same designs going round and round every 3 months and less than a dozen pieces of new work appearing.

Secondly, I’d like to be able to ramk, or rate or reorganise my feed and boards based on popularity, whether that’s based on repins, likes, comments or come combination of all I don’t care.

Until then I will continue to use Pinterest as an inspiration stream, I like having my boards available to review at any time. But my excitement of a month ago has died and I know see that Pinterest may just die out soon if it does not continue to innovate.

If you’d like to se what I have pinned and follow me, my profile is pinterest.com/peakdesign

The post Thoughts on Pinterest appeared first on Peak Design.

I hadn’t had an opportunity to do any medium to large scale print work since then and I was equal parts nervous and excited to get back into it.  It was great fun to get back into InDesign and get my master pages set up, sketch out my layout template in pencil and paper and start looking at how to make this magazine look the business.

The job was going to have be a quick turn around job, the magazine was a last minute idea and the production of it was going to have to be done over 2 days, which suited me pretty well as that was the same time frame I used to have working for Timeoff, and this magazine was only going to be 24 pages, so I felt it was going to be a pretty smooth ride.

Of course, this is where I was grossly mistaken… as with all fond memories I had blocked out the parts of pre-press and magazine production that make it a stressful, annoying job.

Nice big picture for the Ricki Lee feature

The trick to a pre-press magazine layout is that it’s fluid, but that it’s mostly dependent on ad space, the more ads you get, the more editorial content you can have. Seems pretty straightforward, except that you must always increase or decrease your page count in multiples of 4. So if you’ve received an extra 3 pages of content, then it’s up to the producer and senior editor to come up with a way to make the magazine stretch to the 4 pages needed, and that is pretty much 75% of the job.

Social pics and album reviews are always the most challenging to get right

The first 25% is the fun part, picking fonts, deciding upon image sizes, prepping artwork for CMYK printing and getting it all up to a shiny 300dpi quality, that step took a couple of hours tops, the next day and half was all about getting it all to fit into the 24 pages we had in a nice way, and still have it legible and look good.

In the end I really enjoyed getting back into the pre-press world for a little while, as with every client I would have loved to have had more time to finesse the design and do more creative things with the layout, but the brief was to keep it simple and make it loks liek a street press magazine, and I think we managed to do that.

I would have liked to have had the time to play around with alternate layouts for these kinds of pages

Also would have been great to have been able to design the front cover… maybe next time. Special thanks need to go to Sean Sennett of TimeOff Media & Darryl Bailey of EMI Music Australia for the opportunity to work on the EMI All Australian Selection magazine. You can check out EMI list of All Australian artists and listen to their Spotify playlist here

The post Pre-Press Production…it’s been a while appeared first on Peak Design.

Part One is here http://abduzeedo.com/best-abduzeedo-2011-part-1
Part Two is here http://abduzeedo.com/best-abduzeedo-2011-part-2

The post Abduzeedo design best of for 2011 appeared first on Peak Design.

A little bit of History

I could write an entire post about the history of Anak Karakatau, but I’m no historian and that would be boring for most people, so let’s just get the cool and interesting bits out of wikipedia and those of you who want an in depth info session can Google to your heart’s content.

Anak Krakatau is located in the Sunda Strait between the islands of Java and Sumatra which is a very shallow area of flat sea dotted with little islands. Most people won’t recognise the name Anak Karatau, but everyone should have already heard of Krakatoa, the massive volcano that erupted back in 1883. That eruption is known as the “sound that shook the world”, the pressure wave from the final explosion was recorded on barographs around the world, which continued to register it up to 5 days after the explosion. The recordings show that the shock-wave from the final explosion reverberated around the globe 7 times in total. Ash was propelled to a height of 80 km. The sound of the eruption was so loud it was said that if one was within ten miles (16 km), they would go deaf.

Anak Krakatau is the volcano that sprang form the ruins left over by the Krakatoa Eruption, it first popped up out of the sea in 1927 and has been growing steadily ever since at an average rate of 13cm per week. There are explosions pretty much every day…as you may see further down.

…and there endeth the lesson.

Getting there

Most visitors to the volcano depart from the island of Sumatra…but we were in Jakarta on the island of Java, and it seemed silly to fly somewhere and then drive and then get a boat. So we hired a van and a driver and drove from Jakarta to the harbor town of Anyer, which I’ll explain more about next.

The drive was intense and long, traffic in South East Asia is a mess at the best of times, and highway travel is even worse, the idea of lanes is considered to be the most disregardable of guidelines, and no-one gives a crap about undertaking, overtaking, indicating or any of those other general road rules. I wish I had some photos to back up all this crazy talk (if you’ve never seen it, you can’t really imagine it), but I was too busy being gripped by a sensational fear and excitement watching the driver work his magic to stay on the road, that and we left at about 5am, so I was too tired to give a crap about blogging!

Anyer

Anyer is a pretty small town, but it has some historical impact for those of you who are wanting to visit the volcano. It is home to a forty metre lighthouse built by King Willem III of the Netherlands in 1885 as a memorial for the townspeople killed by the eruption of Krakatoa, which destroyed the town and completely obliterated the original brick lighthouse that you can still see the foundations of barely 30 meters away.

While other braver members of my family climbed the tiny spiraling staircase in what I like to call the “steely death trap of doom” lighthouse. I hung around on terra-firma and took some shots as the sun dipped below the watery horizon and listened to our guide getting meticulously grilled by my mum for more details. It was nice place but had an eerie vibe of the tragedy that had occurred there, and I have been told the view from the lighthouse is pretty nice.

We also popped in to visit the seismological center that monitors the activity for Anak Krakatao, although to call it a center is being pretty nice. It was basically a one room operation, with charts and maps on all walls and this one guy constantly sitting in front of the live seismographic readout watching the needle bounce up and down.

The guys there were really cool though, very informative and really quite happy to answer any questions we had and show us how it all worked, they explained to us that there were 4 sensors on the volcano, but they only had 3 working, as the fourth one kinda got a bit banged up in the last big eruption…I believe it got hit by a rock or maybe a dozen rocks, not sure, but the solar panels were dead that’s for sure.

The Way there

The next morning it was day trip time, and after my bad experience on the speedboat to and from Gili Trawangan I took my sea-sickness pill and put on a brave face whilst I prepared myself for a bloody horrible day on a boat. Did I mention I hate boats?

Surprisingly the sea was dead flat the whole way there, and afterwards I realised this was because the whole seabed between these island is shallow and flat…which makes for smooth seas (yay!) and also makes for pretty bad tsunamis from certain massive volcano eruptions (crap!).

We passed bamboo squid fishing platforms that come alive at night with spotlights to catch the little squidies that inhabit the area, and then slowly saw the islands reveal themselves in the distance out of our misty horizon.

There are 3 islands that surround the volcano, they are the remnants from the original Krakatoa, as we approached them in our little boat it gave us a sense of how big the original volcano must have been, and also of how much of it completely blew up and got tossed into the sea creating that massive tsunami back in 1883.

The plan for the day was to tour around the volcano, then stop off on it and hike halfway up the side of it before heading off to one of the other islands for some lunch and snorkeling.

The Smouldering mountain

As we headed closer towards the volcano we could see it was letting off a lot of steam both from the crater and from small vents up the side, the landscape around the island was all greys and blacks of rock and dirt and ash dotted with yellow sulfur. Yet one side of the island had trees and lush jungle underbrush and a smooth black sandy beach, quite the contrast.

After circling the volcano we pulled into the black sandy beach and stepped onto shore. If it weren’t for the massive smoking hill this beach would have been paradise! Once everyone was off the boat we found a little path leading off the beach and were greeted by the local national parks men who are tasked with overseeing the volcano.

Now these guys had a weird job, they camped in tiny lean to tents out on the island for a couple of weeks per shift and advised us tourists if it was safe to hike up the mountain or not. Sounds pretty normal, but they are also tasked with protecting the island from potential invaders, and that was why they were walking around barefoot in green camo-esque gear holding machine guns under their arms…I love Asia!

So after milling about for 5 minutes while our guide and the guards discussed our plans and safety up the mountain it was revealed to us that the volcano was not safe enough for us to hike up the side, but we were allowed to wander up and down the black sandy beach. This kinda bummed us out a bit as we had spent most of the boat trip around the volcano debating the various heights we may be able to get to, but we dutifully trudged off down the beach and took photos of driftwood (or drift trees given their size) and other various bits and pieces that caught our fancy along the way.

The mountain puts on a show

okay, so maybe the title gives too much away, but it also makes you keep reading…now where was I? Oh yeah, so we were walking along the beach taking photos of the black sand and the trees being eroded away by the ocean, and we reach the end of this little beach and think to ourselves “well this is pretty cool, but I wish I was hiking up a volcano” and then BOOM! the earth rumbles and we get hit by a sound so deep with bass it’s hard to describe (you hear it…but you feel it more…)

Stupidly my first instinct is to look to my immediate surroundings, whereas other more astute family members eyes went straight for the volcano which was now billowing smoke (not that wispy white steam crap…proper big plumes of smoke) at a Dante’s Peak massive eruption finale rate (bad movie…cool eruption).

As we all gather round to watch in awe the ever increasing smoke stack above our heads, thoughts of being covered in ash and potentially ouchy hot stuff creep into our minds and we unanimously agree that we should head back to the machine gun toting park rangers and maybe distance ourselves a little from this potential health hazard.

On our slow walk back, the volcano explodes 5 more times and billows more and more smoke up and out from the crater, but no sparkly molten lava is spewed forth (hence the reason the guides called it an explosion rather than an eruption, I think explosion actually sounds worse). We all quickly hop back in our little boat and head away from the busy volcano as it continues to spew smoke and ash.

Anyone Hungry?

Thinking back on it now, I can only imagine how our poor guide must have felt having a tiny speedboat full of buzzing tourists being all excited and gossipy about a volcano he sees almost every day put on a show just like what we saw, he must have been laughing his head off on the inside…I’m sure he’s seen it put on a much more impressive show.

He diligently steers us towards our next destination of Rakata which is one of the three islands left over from the original Krakatoa eruption. It’s massive, and has a huge sheer cliff on one side which gives you some perspective as to how big the original volcano must have been.

We pull in to a lovely beach on the far side of the island for lunch and some snorkeling, really nice. The beach is pretty much all there is to see, because 5 meters in from the sandy banks is lush, thick deep jungle that engulfs you in moments, which made teh whole thing feel exotic and private…we had the whole beach to ourselves.

Here there be dragons!

Now I know some purists are going to get a bit pissed here…but stuff ‘em. After we finished lunch and had spent some time milling about on the black sandy beach, we noticed some visitors had dropped by to grab our scraps and generally devour anything edible within reach…

These guys moved in such a cool way, they seemed all slow and cool, and then they would lift themselves off the ground and move like a bat out of hell when they had to. They also did this freaky thing where they sort of sat up and watched you…that was unnerving.

Technically speaking they are just plain old iguanas or goannas, and nothing at all like the massive Komodo Dragons of Indonesia, but hey, we were near a volcano and there was a general fire and brimstone vibe, so I’ll call them dragons if I feel like it!

Home Time

After lunch we spent some time snorkeling off the boat, and saw some more cool coral and fish…but the visibility was pretty poor and the camera was just not getting any decent shots. So it was off in the boat and back to our port near Anyer, then a 4 hour drive back to Jakarta.

It was an awesome day, and I would highly recommend it to everyone, our guide was a legend, the food was awesome, and the experience was amazing! You can find the full Flickr stream of these photos and more by clicking here

Next up… the final Indonesian adventure in Ubud, Bali

The post Indonesian Holiday Part 2: Anak Krakatau appeared first on Peak Design.

I decided I should probably share all of these links on the blog and clean house a bit. So here is the list of new design sites I’ve added in and why..

Designspiration
this design site is pure inspiration bliss, with an excellent searching system and some of the best design work found on the web in one easy to use place. I pretty much have this site open at all times.

Wanken
The blog of Designer Shelby White, the man behind Designspiration. Another great source of design inspiration and just someone any graphic designer should be watching and learning from.

.Net Magazine
Industry news doesn’t come much better than .net magazine, they also have some great tutorials.

Logo Design Love
How I managed to not have this design site in the list already is beyond me. I think the name sums it up really well.

Lost & Taken
A very nice resource design site for royalty free textures, and they have some of the best you’ll ever find online.

For Print Only
Another great graphic design site…beautiful works on there.

Web Design Ledger
The name is misleading for this design site, as they cover both print and web design tutorials, resources and inspirational works.

If you haven’t got these sites in your reading list I suggest you go check them out…it’ll be worth it I promise.

The post Some design site links appeared first on Peak Design.

Where the heck?

Gili Trawangan is the largest of the 3 Gili islands, the other two being Gili Air and Gili Meno. All three islands lie off the north west coast of the island of Lombok, which itself sits off the east coast of the largest Indonesian island of Java.

Getting to Gili was a bit of a mission, an international airport is being built on Lombok (finishing in 2012), which will make things a lot easier, but here’s how we did it. We arrived into Jakarta on Friday night, and got to our hotel pretty late, then we had to get up at 4am, to get to the airport by 5:30am so we could get our 6am flight to Lombok.

The flight to Lombok is pretty quick, and if you get a window seat you can see massive volcanoes and mountains on the one side, and tiny little islands dotted across the sea on the other which is pretty sweet. Once in Lombok we had to jump in a car and make our way to the north-west side of the island to get our speedboat to Gili Trawangan, the drive takes about 45min and is pretty picturesque as you climb up hills along the coast and catch great views of pristine beaches and coves, as well as glimpses of village life as you pass by.

Once we got to our boat, it was a quick 15min speedboat ride to the island. It’s probably apt that at this point in the post I mention the fact that I hate boats…a lot. This is something you’ll hear about a few times during the posts about our trip, as we seemed to go on a lot of boats…this is also why there aren’t many shots of the scenery we passed by on our boat trip. I tried taking some shots, but looking into the camera’s viewfinder only made my nausea 1000 times worse.

Gili Trawangan

Arriving at Gilli Trawangan was pretty special, even with the nausea, the broken coral beach and the horse drawn carts, all under a beautiful sunny sky with not a cloud in sight was beautiful. It was the first moment of actual holiday since we left Brisbane, and that felt damn good.

Although Gili Trawangan is the biggest of the Gilis, it is by no means a big island, you can walk all the way around it in a couple of hours, and there’s only a few places where there is more than one road. The greatest thing about all the Gilis is there are no vehicles or motorbikes at all, you either walk, ride a bicycle or get a horse drawn cart…we just walked everywhere.

The biggest problem these islands face, is that there is no fresh water source (it has to get brought over by boat every day) and the rubbish has to get boated back to the mainland as well, something I’m afraid a few tourists didn’t seem to give crap about.

The Beach House

The place we stayed in was called The Beach House and it was pretty special. Situated towards the south end of the island, it’s in what i would call the “quieter” side of the island, still close to all the restaurants, cafes and pubs, but not the ones that are open until 4am on the northern side.

We were staying in the ‘Big Villa’ which was spectacular, a fully enclosed villa with 4 bedrooms, 2 lounge-rooms and our own private pool. Needless to say, we felt spoiled rotten (thanks mum). The Villa did have some kitchen facilities, although why you’d want to cook there I can’t fathom as everything was dirt cheap and really nice, there was an air con and tv in every room as well as a big TV in the lounge room.

Sights & Sounds

There are definitely two sides to Gili Trawangan, the busy side and the quiet side. Half of the circular road is lined on both sides with cafés, restaurants, hotels, dive shops and tourist shops…then it just dies off for the other half of the island, and there is little more than scrub and brush on one side, and the sea on the other…which is very peaceful. The beaches are dotted with outrigger wooden boats and sun chairs under blue umbrellas. There are coral pools at low tide with tiny sea life in them, and coral wind chimes dangling from the trees…

There are some real highlights to visit on the island itself, here are my favorites:

Ko Ko Mo Restaurant (www.kokomogilit.com) is a fabulous fine dining restaurant with some very special food, open for lunch and dinner it’s one of those places hidden along the quieter part of the road around Gili Trawangan. They have these cool looking double bed size sun lounges with an adjustable shade thingy and a private balé for the romantic dinners. We had a really nice family dinner there…

Égoiste Café (égoiste on facebook) is a little café near the busy market square area, they do great coffee and french baguettes for lunch and snacks. They also have some very cute resident cats and kittens who will jump into your seat if you’re not careful.

The Beach House (beachhousegilit.com) was a great place to stay, really nice both inside and out, and a decent restaurant right on the waters edge. They cooked a nice breakfast every morning and put on a big buffet style dinner every night. We also organised our day trip with them and that was perfect.

Turtle Sanctuary is actually only really a display area with a few tanks of baby turtles…but they are cute little things and they deserve and need all the help they can get, so drop in and donate a few dollars.

Scallywags is on Gili Air & Gili Trawangan. Good food, nice decor and a very chilled place to hang out (they have bean bags!). Try their ice cream, it’s pretty awesome.

Sunset Bar is on the west coast of Gili Trawangan for obvious reasons, the bar itself is not much more than a shack, but they do a big bonfire every night with fire twirlers and music, plus the sunset is very impressive.

Treehouse Bar is part of The Trawangan hotel, they have a few little treehouses of varying heights that you can climb up in to and have the waiters bring you drinks and snacks, if you are a big wuss about heights like me, then you may want to choose one of the lower platforms.

Mushrooms are everywhere, and they have some of the best names ever on the signs for them. My personal fave was the guy who offered delivery of his special mushrooms to your hotel room, just call and ask for “Super Fucked-up Mushroom guy”.
Even though the shrooms are advertised everywhere, only once did I see someone completely out of it walking along the street at dawn…he seemed to be enjoying himself.

Snorkelling and Scuba Diving

The main attraction to the Gilis is the diving, there are heaps of dive places on Gili Trawangan, and all of them offer multiple dive trips every day. You can snorkel straight off the beach, but your best bet is to get in on a dive trip or hire a boat for a day and make up your own tour, most hotels will help you plan this and I can vouch for the great day we had on our little tour. I went on 4 dives around Gili Trawangan, with some good drift diving, wall diving and some impressive creatures. I really need to get a proper housing for my camera.

We did all our diving through Big Bubble Dive who were awesome! I can’t recommended them highly enough, they were helpful, easy going and flexible, which was great as our group had 2 advanced divers 2 people finishing off their open, one open water diver and a complete newbie…and they still took care of all of us with a smile.

We also booked a day trip through The Beach House which took us to 2 snorkel spots where I got pretty damn close to a green sea turtle, and perhaps a little too close to a banded sea snake…equal parts exciting and petrifying!

We visited Gili Meno (the middle island) which has a lake on it, but you wouldn’t drink the water voluntarily. It was very peaceful and had the one nice looking little bar/café. We then had lunch on Gili Air, which is basically a quieter version of Gili Trawangan, with a tourist strip of cafés and dive shops and small villa style hotels.

The Obligatory Summary

The holiday on Gili Trawangan was really great, every day was packed with stuff to do and see, I had some great dives, and ate so much great food…the whole boat thing is a real pain in the arse, but it’s absolutely worth it.

The Holiday doesn’t end here…next up is Anak Krakatao

The post Indonesian Holiday Part 1: Gili Trawangan appeared first on Peak Design.

Semi-Permanent Goodies

I spent Friday the 5th of August at the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre at Semi-Permanent listening to 8 industry pros talk about their work and the journey they took to reach where they are now. It was a really good day, and it did inspire me in many ways…

Gemma O’Brien typographer

web: fortheloveoftype.com.au / twitter: @mrseaves

Gemma O’Brien – Write Here, Right Now

Tough gig going up first for Gemma, and we weren’t the warmest crowd by any means, but she had such enthusiasm about her work and her passion that we all loosened up very quickly and got our heads into the design zone.

Gemma’s love of type in all forms is infectious, and her opening remarks about going to a letterpress studio and holding the type in your hands resonated pretty deep with me as that is something I have always wanted to do and see and experiment with, but have never pushed myself to seek out.

Her work is great and takes what most people (and indeed most designers) take for granted and really turns it on it’s head and makes you think: why did they choose that font? What does that font say? Would the message be any different if the font changed? And those are questions a designer should be asking themselves all the time, and something I had gotten out of the habit of doing as I had my own little “go-to” pack of fonts.

I’ll never be someone who makes my own typeface, I just don’t have the patience or the skill, but I now have an even deeper respect for those who do, and I will be hitting the books and researching the history of type and also pay more attention to what my font choices mean.

Sam Leach artist

web: samleach.net

Sam Leach

Sam is an intense kind of guy and his story is pretty amazing. He came late to teh art world, and then took his time learning. He has a great understanding of the art he makes and where his style comes form and what it aspires to, such deep knowledge and understanding is admirable and really made me think that I should spend a lot more time looking into the history of design.

Sam’s art is brilliant, he is a big fan of the dutch masters and the minimalism and use of ‘empty’ space, or rather the space between things. This is something I love as well, I’m a huge fan of minimalist design and draw most of my inspiration form the Swiss graphic design, and I could see parallels between the minimalist art world and design world.

I spend a lot of time looking at design news and latest trends on the web, but Sam reminded me that I should also be looking into the history of design and finding ways to use that to inspire me as well.

Eddie Zammit production

web: t-world.com.au

T-World

Eddie Zammit, founder and production manager for T-World, an annual magazine publication dedicated to the humble t-shirt. Eddie had lot’s to say, and he presented really well, he spoke of his love of design and made sure he pointed out taht he wasn’t one. He ran Grin Creative for a while, then threw it all away to follow his passion (or is it obsession?) with t-shirts…

Although Eddie isn’t a designer, he has a great eye for design and an infectious love of all areas of design, he spoke a lot about the work he has done on the latest issue of T-World which is yet to be released (October 2011), and his 5 month stint in New York and how important it was for him to stay there so he could really get involved with the designers there.

Eddie made sure he told everyone that running a magazine is a crap job, and I can vouch for that, I only worked for a small street-press magazine in the production department for a little while, but I remember the mad rush and the week by week lifestyle of those who were more heavily involved…and yet, I miss it. Compared to the never-ending cycle of the 9 to 5 in house designer, there is a certain appeal to the frenetic rush, creativity inspiring, deadline driven, mad world of magazines. I want back in!

Oh, and one last thing Eddie inspired me to do….buy some T-Shirts.

Kelly Thompson illustrator

web: kellythompson.co.nz / twitter: @kellythompson1 / facebook: kellythompson

Kelly Thompson

Kelly was great, I must point out though that her bio said she was an illustrator and she’s much more than that. Kelly started her career as a photographer, and still does a lot of it, working in the fashion and modelling area in New Zealand, she did a lot of work for Pulp Magazine, but her passion lies in illustration and she is awesome at it.

I envy people with the skill that Kelly has, I used to draw a little when I was a teenager, I liked sketching and every now and then I try and pick up a pencil and do it, but really I’m pretty crap at it. My deign sketches are always a poor imitation of what is actually in my head and I often see that look in my clients eyes when I show them preliminary sketches that says “you are a designer right? because that looks horrible…”.

What makes Kelly’s work unique is her mix of illustration and photography, which just looks hot! Overlaying her unique illustration sensibility over beautiful photos leaves you with a piece of work that is stunning and has a certain “through the looking glass” feel to it, which I think rocks.

It’s shame that Kelly hasn’t had much of a chance to do what she really loves in a commercial sense, which are beautiful illustrations of girls…I think those works of art she showed us during her talk deserved to be framed and hung on a gallery wall where they would easily hold their own.

Kelly’s lesson for me was versatility, even though your passion and desire may lie elsewhere, you need to be able to fill a client brief no matter what it is…don’t try and twist a design brief to your liking, twist your design to the clients needs.

Toby Dixon photographer

web: tobydixon.com / twitter: @TobyDixonPhoto

Toby Dixon

Toby is a storyteller at heart I think. He had the whole audience in the palm of his hand from the moment he began to the moment he was done and we all thought “what? already? I want more!”… He was relaxed and engaging, which I guess comes form having put himself out there to get the photos he wanted.

All of Toby’s photos have a certain quality about them that make them look absolutely amazing. I’m not photographer by any menas, I love taking photos and I have a nice camera, but that’s where the skill ends…I have just enough knowledge to see that what Toby was doing was freaking amazing stuff.

His landscape works have so much feeling in them (I know that sounds airy and artsy, but have a look at his Mojave Desert series and you’ll get it) and his portraiture series are sublime stuff. He took us on his journey through the Mojave Desert, his quest to capture his local bowls club patrons and finally his latest work on The Lure at the dog track.

Toby has had to break himself out of pigeon holes a couple of times, and that means taking risks and showing dedication towards your passion. That’s what I took away form Toby’s talk, if you want to do something, then you’re going to have to work hard and keep trying until you get it…

Webuyyourkids Illustration & Design

web: wbyk.com.au / twitter: @webuyyourkids / facebook: webuyyourkids

webuyyourkids

What a duo! Sonny & Biddy were hilarious. These 2 have a lot of talent and a produce some very unique and very cool work. They’ve worked mostly in the music scene creating posters both in limited run screen prints and standard giclee prints. What I loved about their work is that they made the effort to make the screen prints and giclee prints different, yet follow the same theme, so you’d be happy having either but would ultimately want both.

It was interesting to hear their professional development before they teamed up, and it I found it interesting to hear how they worked together, which was very much a process of Sonny conceptualising and sketching, then handing over to Biddy to do the digital work before handing back to Sonny to do the screen prints work by hand.

What I found great about that is the level of trust they must have in each other to be able to hand over a deign to someone and know that what you’ll get back will be true to your original work and also be something that is imbued with more personality…very cool and very rare.

I loved their little animated video clip they did for Washington’s “Clementine” (watch here), and of course being the music buffs they are, they flipped the song to one of their favourites that they’d been talking about so much….classic!

Supervixen video & animation

web: supervixen.net / twitter: @mrseaves

Supervixen – élan decks

These boys were fun, messy but fun. We were lucky enough to have the 2 founders of Supervixen Morten Rowley and Daniel Bavell on the day. Both of whom have had pretty good careers before teaming up and creating Supervixen.

With backgrounds in illustration and character design, they showcased a lot of their individual work creating skateboard deck graphics for élan (elanskateboards.com) and giving away board during their talk, which almost caused a fight, a first at Semi-Permanent apparently.

Their illustration skills are impressive, they have pretty unique styles, very light vs dark in fact. They showed us their showreel which was cool and gave us some background to the Wrigleys campaign they created characters for which was a good insight into their design process. (start with 38 characters and end up with 8).

I would have liked to have seen more of their Supervixen work and heard more about their process…but it was still entertaining.

Reg Mombassa artist

web: regmombassa.com / twitter: @RegMombassa / facebook: reg.mobassa

Reg Mombassa – The Miracle of Pies and Beer

What a legend of the Australian art scene and popular culture this man is, oh and he’s bloody funny too. Clearly this man has his own style, not just in his art but in his life as a whole. He showed us through a huge body of work from his early work whilst playing with Mental As Anything, to his landscape work and on to his Mambo days.

Reg’s relaxed attitude towards his work and the art scene was really refreshing. I took one thing he said to heart which was that someone is always going to object to your art in some way, you can’t do anything about it, so don’t worry about it, just do it.

That comment makes me realise that I should trust my instincts more and push the boundaries of my designs more, playing it safe may keep my clients happy, but it won’t make me a better designer.

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We made up 2 videos for the night, synchronised to music and projected through the main ballroom of the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre  on screens either side of the main stage. The first one was a photo slideshow of important milestones and staff social events from throughout the year.  The second was an animated corporate video about the company’s achievements and future.

It was great to get back into doing some work in Adobe Flash, and was one of the tightest deadlines I’ve had in a while, but the people at Lend Lease were fabulous to work with and I hope to be able to do it again soon.

You can see some stills from the presentations in the folio.

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Both ads were nice little flash banner ads, and thanks to the recent work with lend Lease to get my skills back up to scratch I was ready to do more of the interactive work for these ads.

You can see more of what they are like in the folio.

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