I love a good clearout. I’m the daughter of an artist-designer who turned his own into an event – canvases would be ripped; pots smashed; bonfires piled high; work buried in the meadow at the end of the garden. One day, archaeologists will ponder the rituals that these might have … Read More
Buscuit. No, that’s not a typo. Well, it was, until someone taking part in some sketch engagement I was doing at Cody Dock wrote it (biscuit being one of those words it’s surprisingly tricky to remember how to spell) and we decided that it should not just be a word … Read More
On the face of it, I have three strands of work: design, creative direction and sketch illustration. But I bring my design knowledge to illustration formats and materials and my reportage eye to my work on communication design and branding. Here, two strands of my work are drawn together – … Read More
Chip fork fish? DIY postcards? There’s been a field trip to the seaside for the latest episode of Studio Snack, a food podcast about design that I make with Narcis Sauleda. We were researching seaside snacks and for our grand day out, as well as my usual hand-bound sketchbook made … Read More
You might think these look a bit rough and ready. And you’d be right. That’s the point. For my live sketching work, I think about format just as I do with design for events. What’s the character of the event? What is the style of the venue? What’s going on? … Read More
A by-product of writing a bio or summary information is the chance to wrangle the question I’ve often asked branding clients: “In one sentence, what do you do?”. On the face of it, my work has got more complicated as I’ve gone along. As I’ve gathered knowledge, graphic design has … Read More
A half-finished word. This is part of a slow side project spinning off from notes scribbled in a writing workshop involving a harp (thank you, fellow 26 member Fiona Thompson) – but I digress. This half-finished embroidered word. Embroidery is very Zen. I get to look at work in progress … Read More
A lemon top ice cream in Redcar. That hadn’t been the plan. Whitby had been my next colour trip, for jet black and the Old Norse for white, more of which later. But getting there turned out to be fiddly so I had designed a scenic route North, wiggling down … Read More
“Held in lime, dipped in pink.” That was one of my notes as I made a colour swatch of a daisy. Why? Well, for our Studio Snack episode on edible flowers, because colour is what they so often bring to a dish, my creative experiment looked at that by way … Read More
Pencil shavings. Brush twirls. I like the by-products of creative endeavour. I’ve even made a visual identity out of them, discarding the vector images I had made in favour of the shapes left on my screen. And so, cutting out petals from old paper swatches for a Studio Snack podcast … Read More