Over the last few years, I have featured some of the ‘stuff’ I’ve produced throughout the year; 20172016.
Yes, I’ve worked on a few ‘other’ projects for people this year, but just a few select favours.
Instead, I continue to enjoy the small amount of functional creativity (and the large amount of productivity) involved in my 9-5 job.
Throughout 2018, my 50th year alive, I have tried to take a few deep breaths, and just ‘notice the sky and feel the wind’ as a friend put it recently.
I bike, I create images, and I try my best to be present… I’d like to wish you best wishes for 2019!
Back to the topic – here are eighteen relatively random pics, quickly plucked from my various online streams. You can see my Instagram feed here: @julesprichards
And here are all of last year’s (2018) witterings below:
I just completed a branding job for sports massage therapist George Himan based in Leicester. George asked me for a new logo and graphic identity for his business; something “clean, tidy and to the point”.
George provides “a convenient mobile service designed to fit around your busy schedule. A session designed to meet your individual needs. This can vary from full body massage to injury/recovery specific massage”.
After playing with a few options we all agreed on was in fact my first sketch.
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An update to the original Post: We’ve now produced flyers, vouchers, vinyl banners, and integrated the style on clothing and online – you can see GHMR here.
Brand consistency is important and it pays to manage this well – when people see quality and consistency in your visual brand, they see strength, reliability, and professionalism.
A few years back, while working for schools and public libraries throughout the country, I created a variety of educational bookmarks. Various versions of my measure / fraction / percentage bookmark design were used in many areas. These simple bookmarks were found to be a useful visual numeracy resource. I have recently reworked the design for a local school, using ‘100 square’ graphics rather than pie-chart graphics. It’s a simple thing that might help children to visualise the concepts.
Also, I’ve contacted John Duffty at Mathsticks.com and recomposed his great Maths Bookmark idea. Two simple bookmark designs to engage the user with numbers. John says “the children used the questions independently and were very keen to let us know if they had found an interesting answer, or discovered a ‘fun’ number fact”. You can download a printable PDF of my design here: MathsBookmarks.PDF
I’ve updated the post below with some new wall prints that I’ve just created for our new walls…
Brighten up your wall … even more than that, make it personal!
If you need help getting a unique personal image for your wall, let me take a look for you.
Whether it be for your office, lounge, diner or bedroom
let’s take a look and see what we can make fit.
I’m happy to take some shots for you, I can work with images you’ve taken, or
I might work from your brief/ideas or concept.
I’d like a red flower…
I want a picture of Benji our dog…
We’d like a family portrait…
I have some old prints of Gran and Grandad…
Can you do something abstract … ?
Can you remove the lamp post … ?
We can meet up and I’ll take a roll of shots for you to view.
You can leave briefs or material with me and I’ll work on your concept.
Or perhaps you have something else in mind?
We can create work for canvas prints of various sizes or large-format wall mural prints.
Of if you just want a print for framing yourself I can produce it professionally.
The answers usually yes! … as long as it’s legal it is ethical 🙂
I just charge for my creative time, and I source reproductions from various reliable cost-effective printers.
This one has been sitting in my mind for a few weeks after my daughter left me a small card on my pillow at Christmas with this written on the envelope.
Kids can have such a fresh outlook on life and I’m aware that we’re privileged to share our lives with growing, inquisitive, vibrant young people.
Regarding the image above – This is what I do. Some people draw, some paint, some watch football, some like gardening. I make images. Often this is in the form of digital photo collages.
I was listening to BBC Radio 4’s Thinking Allowed recently, and they were talking about sensory landscapes. As ever, Laurie Taylor’s guests go off on one and get a little academic and wordy. But it’s true, we live in our selective sensory worlds. Each of us selects different elements from our environment. The programme talks about ‘scenes’ and ‘lifestyle bubbles’. They also talk about ‘-scapes’ and how we are always enveloped by sounds, as well as smells, mannerisms and culture. People’s practices mark people’s experiences. Monica Degen says“People sense in very different ways…”. Our selected practices, our selected perspectives, affect our selected views and experiences of things.
I love the phenomena of dreaming and dreams. I’m a great one for cheese before bed, though I doubt it affects one’s dream-life. One’s imagination resonating outside of the input from the sources we are daily surrounded by should be celebrated and enjoyed. This includes daydreams.
Children are often dreaming outside of the material they are presented with, and long may they be encouraged to think outside of the material we present them with. Edward De Bono says in his interesting book ‘Children Solve Problems‘, “A Child … enjoys the use of his mind just as he enjoys the use of his body as he slides down a helter-skelter or bounces on a trampoline”.
Back to ‘Sleep Note’, I hope we can all remember to enjoy the use of our minds, just as we might remember the exhilarating experience of bouncing on a trampoline. I love the idea of growing and inquisitively opening the envelope when our sensory world is cut of! Open the envelope when you go to sleep folks, vibrantly! x
Last year, I looked back at the turbulent 2016 and collated some snapshots of work I produced – you can see 2016 ‘here’.
This year, I have thankfully enjoyed full employment, and so there’s not been so much time to spend on ‘other things’. This year I’ve loved the day-to-day busyness of the work servicing the admirable staff at a local secondary school: 1000+ students and 100+staff keep a one-man reprographics department quite busy. (I’ve also enjoyed the bike-commute, now in my 7th Winter)
I have also had a great year with my ladies – they are my world, and I owe everything to them, especially Em. Em deserves the biggest thanks and praise for putting up with the introverted confused creative wonderer that I often am. I might not often feel as though I belong, but Em does her utmost to embrace me, and together with A and P they make life dearly vibrant and to be cherished, shared and celebrated.
Despite being busy at work, there have been a few out-of-hours projects:
Some people live vibrantly, painting, splashing, etching, layering, and filling their canvases with energising colour and texture. Some people’s lives seem passionately imbued with sights, sounds, people, places, hobbies, habits… I am not talking about professions, I am meaning individual’s personal tapestries. People who plunge into culture and community, people who enjoy and celebrate many aspects of the world we are creating. I admire and applaud many of the people that stand out in our community. I admire and applaud hearty homemakers, community stalwarts, keepers of tradition and pioneering adventurers. Where would we be without them?
I’ve encountered plenty of stuff over time, and yes I have enjoyed and celebrated much of it, but alas I have never really opted to develop or evangelise this, that or the other. After 30 years of adulthood; after years of scribbling, erasing, doodling and redrawing; I fear my personal canvas hosts an accumulation of unfulfilled shapes, smudges, faded bleeding colours.
As a visual and performance art student I was always attracted to the abstract. Many years on, I still find the abstract more enticing than the real. I am drawn less to the objective material and more to the subjective essential.
With our media currently covering the centenary of the Russian Revolution, I am reminded of a favourite painting of mine; Kazimir Malevich’s ‘White on White’. His Suprematist paintings were aligned with his ideas around “the supremacy of pure artistic feeling” rather than the visual depiction of objects. Today, we seek objective truth over subjective opinion, but perhaps today more than ever, with our object worship and linguistic ownership battles, it might pay to be more mindful of a true essential supre-subjectivity.
On a recent trip to West Cornwall, the place where I was ‘brought up’, I was reminded of the power of the natural, the essential. The sea, the water, the natural or wild, the powerful landscape of the coast. Many of us are drawn to such places. Like hill-climbing, where we can find ourselves at a thin place, where our object filled lives meet ‘space’. Where we are confronted with a space bigger than our canvas, a power stronger than our tools, a force that might blow away cobwebs or wash tired hands or weary faces. An abstract place, where popular objectivity might be seen as shallow mirage, a place where we might be able to feel more and think more.
I work with paper; large quantities of paper. It has struck me when I wash my hands at work, how remarkably refreshing the water can be after a few hours handling reams and reams of paper. We cannot objectively see the dust we are handling but when washing we can subjectively feel the cleansing soothing freshness of washing away the patina.
As I mentioned, as time goes on, I am drawn less to the material and more to the essential.
Frank Bowling
I have always loved Malevich’s ‘White on White’ with its off-white depth, its imperfect cleanliness. But I also love vibrant resonate stuff like the work of Frank Bowling’s pure abstractions. I am thankful for passionate people who enjoy and celebrate our world. But I consider it vital that we are mindful of the cleansed off-white, the smudgy greys, the tainted blurry edges, and the residual watermarks that are perpetual, eternal, and will endure in and around us no matter what.
DJS Sports Massage are about to launch and came to me for a bit of bling!
Dan needed some fliers and imagery to reinforce the service and help spread the word.
DS Sports Massage is a new venture run in Leicester by Dan Squires, a recently qualified Sports Massage Therapist. They offer mobile house calls so you can enjoy a massage in the comfort of your own home. DJS offer a range of professional services from sports massage treatments to sports injury rehabilitation programmes. Sports Massage offers full treatments which include a range of various techniques including:
I was asked if I could create a visually impacting flyer for a local home and garden maintenance company who are focusing on their window and conservatory cleaning service.
Of course.
I took a selection of standard photo’s they had taken and enhanced them to make them effective. I put together a basic content structure, redrew their logo, and using the logo’s shape as a design element created this flyer design for them.
Together with the final printed flyer printed 1000 items on a quality 250gsm stock, I supplied some imagery for them to share online and via social media.
If you need your outside white-work cleaned to looking like new … and you’re in Birstall or Charnwood Leicestershire … give ‘um a call.
Jules P Richards 