Photography: Southampton Docks

London Architecture Print

Over the summer I did a lot of research into modern and more industrial architecture that dominates many cities nowadays, here's one of the images I made inspired by a great building I came across!

Penguin Design Award 2013: The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler

Here is my entry for the Penguin Design Award 2013! Our brief was to redesign the jacket for Raymond Chandler's crime noir novel 'The Big Sleep'. I immensely enjoyed this project, from reading the book and conducting research into 40s and 50s cityscapes, to illustrating the themes and tone of the novel on the front cover. I chose to try and create the title 'The Big Sleep' out of city buildings, you can see how my idea developed in the images below.

And after much tweaking, here is the finished product! I was lucky enough to be shortlisted by Penguin, which was possibly one of the most shocking and exciting things I have ever experienced!

As I was shortlisted, I was invited to the Penguin offices in London for the award ceremony (as an avid reader and book reviewer, I was VERY excited to say the least). My mum and I went along and had a fantastic day. We took in the amazing view of London, drank champagne, chatted with my tutors, even had a few chats with Joanna Prior, the Managing Director of Penguin and John Hamilton, the General Art Director (woweeee!) They were all such lovely, down-to-earth people, to my surprise I didn't feel even slightly intimidated, just welcomed.

 The standard of all the entries was incredible, I was blown away by everyone's book covers! I particularly loved Sam Barley's entry (above). I think it sums up the book brilliantly.

I was absolutely thrilled to get Highly Commended along with two others! Below is a picture of me and the 3 other winners/highly commendeds. What a day. Thanks so so much to Penguin for an experience I will definitely never forget!

Nobrow Point of Sale Display: Bicycle by Ugo Gattoni

My university was lucky enough to have Sam Arthur from Nobrow come in and set us a live brief: to create a point of sale display for any Nobrow book of our choice. I chose Bicycle by Ugo Gattoni; his style of drawing was something that really resonated with me, I adored it. I also love London and architecture, so choosing Bicycle was really a no-brainer.

The wildly imaginative scenery in Gattoni's book was hugely inspiring, and I gave myself no other option than to attempt to create my own small scale 'mini-city' in Gattoni's style. I drew all of the buildings and details straight from Bicycle onto larger nets and after much, MUCH time drawing, I was able to assemble them together with my own little winding path and little cyclists (scanned from the book) and my model city was complete! 

Genius Loci Brief: Victoria Station

Here is one of the first books I ever made, hurrah! Towards the end of our second year, we were all asked to choose a place or area that we found inspiring, and then respond to it in any way we felt appropriate. I selected Victoria Station in London, I loved the buzz and busyness of the station, especially in the Underground where hundreds of wires and electrics run and tie together only a few metres above your head.

My response to this brief related to the volume of people passing through the main floor of the station, and how this varied depending on the time. I took 10 seconds of footage at the start of every hour in the main floor of the station, to record how many people passed through it, the exact paths they took, and how they interweaved and moved around each other.

I used this information and published it in the form of a book, where you can slide the pages to choose which particular hour/hours you wish to see. The dots represent the commuters who were stationary during the time of recording, and I provided a key on the top page to illustrate where the exits, toilets and gates to trains were. This gives a clearer idea where the commuters might be going.

You can clearly see trends on every page, there are two or three areas in particular that have a very high volume of people travelling through it each hour, and others that are commonly reserved for people standing or waiting. Other areas you can see stay relatively unpopulated and stay almost completely empty. You can see in the image above (1pm and 6pm pages) where these busy paths are.