Another week, another cover remodel exercise at Warren Ellis‘ Whitechapel forum:
You are an artist/designer. You have to put together the cover for the first issue of a weekly science-fiction anthology comic called 2000AD.
You don’t know much about what’s in it. You’ve been given the following pieces of information to include on the cover somehow:
“featuring the new DAN DARE”
“M.A.C.H. 1 – his incredible hyperpower will amaze you!”
“SPACE-AGE DINOSAURS! Read ‘FLESH’ ”
“STOP PRESS! GREAT BRITAIN INVADED!”
Without the “”, obviously. Your choice as to how you use these — whether you relegate them all to text at the bottom, or choose one to illustrate, or whatever.
The cover must include a logo and the numbering, which you’ve been told is not the usual “issue one,” but “Programme 1.”
And that’s it.
It’s up to you what kind of company you’re at. What kind of comics you make. What era you’re in. Who you are, even. Go nuts with it.(Obviously, there was a time when 2000 AD was The Future. So, you tell me. Is this a retro-sf comic? Or are you in the late 19th century and publishing it on punch cards? Is it the Seventies and are you Roger Dean? Or Jamie Reid?)
It sort of mirrors the truth of 2000AD Prog 1, which was that it didn’t strictly speaking have a cover illustration, as a massive frisbee was mounted on the front cover as a free gift.
And so I did this — 2000AD as a high-end glossy SF periodical:
Remade 2000AD Cover
A recurring topic on Warren Ellis’ Whitechapel forum is the Remake/Remodel exercise, where Warren throws up the description of an obscure super/pulp/SF character (usually long out of print and in the public domain) and invites the forum members to reinterpret said character. I usually just sit and watch, but this week he opened it up to design, with the Superman cover:
“So here’s the deal:
You are an artist/designer. You have to put together the cover for a comic called SUPERMAN. It is issue 1 of this book.
You have been told that Superman is a man who dresses predominantly in a shade of blue, and wears a red S symbol. You know nothing else about the character.
The cover must include a logo and the text THE COMPLETE STORY OF THE DARING EXPLOITS OF THE ONE AND ONLY SUPERMAN.
And that’s it.
It’s up to you what kind of company you’re at. What kind of comics you make. How you translate that description of Superman. What era you’re in. Who you are, even. Go nuts with it.
You have one week. Go.”
And so I thought “lets have some fun” and I threw together some bits I had lying around and came up with this:
Remade Superman cover
You can see all the results over at the Whitechapel forum thread. Nice to see that the online comic/geek press took note of it and started spreading around the news.
FF AW10 lookbook front.
More images soon.
GREEN ARROW #31 cover
For the series I was asked to design the trade dress and the RISE AND FALL/RISE OF/FALL OFF logos for the storyline, which they applied to the covers. Nice to see the final results!
I’ll be posting more about this later.
A few days ago comics scribe extraordinaire (and fast becoming Hollywood darling) Mark Millar held a little ‘design a new logo for my forum’ competition.
Now, before I hear everyone yelling ‘SPEC WORK!’, sometimes you have to give in to your inner geek and have some fun for half an hour or so.
Of course I didn’t win. But now I have the beginnings of a new typeface.
This was the first year that we worked on the Felder FelderAW collection showing at London Fashion Week. It was also the first public performance of the new logo/marque we designed for them. Sadly we couldn’t be there on the night itself, so we had to make do with a lo-res video from LFW TV.
I just updated my other site ximeraLabs. Well, I say ‘update’… all I did was add a new splash/holding page — whatever you want to call it. The last time I updated the site was in 2006! But thats the way it goes I guess. XimeraLabs started life as my primary website in 2000-2001 — part graphic playground, part portfolio. Over the years there seemed to be less and less need to do something with the site as a creative outlet, mainly because I launched this site in 2003, and focussed all my attention here. Adding to that fact that I could/can use work as a creative outlet, setting aside time to populate ximeraLabs with experiments for the sake of experimenting became a moot point.
Anyway. During the past few years I’ve collected a load of (unused) work, failed experiments, tests, etc… that I think have more life than just slowly rotting away in a folder on a drive, so I think its time to start remixing and putting out content again.
I have just updated our /Mr and Mrs M./ website, adding projects Liz and I have been doing recently, including a lot of work for German fashion duo Felder Felder, who we’ve been working with since 2007.
Go have a look at our work!
I’ve been working on and off for the past 2 years or so on the first issue of Starling, and I finally assembled the selection of work I want to show within its pages. Now “all” that needs to be done is the cover…
First press blurb of 2010, in the 198th issue of .net magazine which discusses tips and trends for 2010:
“Don’t live in a vacuum — use available network tools to syndicate your content in a smart manner. One push of a button can send your blog’s content to Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, MySpace and Ning”
— Tom Muller, Kleber
(And to find out where you can find me online, just look at the link list)