I'm a free Citizen again...

Monday November 29th Citizen version 2 (it's not called that, that would be horrible) will be born again. I'm building on Citizen as it was, and expanding the whole thing out to 3 core areas of activity: 

Citizen Corporate will deal with the day-to-day business of a normal Marketing agency, I'll be looking for branding, advertising and corporate literature projects, all the kinds of things that have been paying the bills for the last 10 years.

Citizen Arts is really Citizen as it was, a softer more artistic side to the business, that'll deal with record companies, bands and clubs, and anyone that needs a creative piece of work doing and doesn't want to get bogged down in briefs and PO numbers. 

Citizen Freelance is a freelance design service that's going to give people the experience of my 10 years in the business, working for them in their company - the way freelancers do, but booked direct through me you can avoid the agency fees.

The new Citizen site is up and running, and from here you can find out more about all my services.

It's been a furious few weeks of evening activity so far and I want to thank Karen, Dad, Maria, Ellie, Skelly, Rik, Parker, Jon, Stacey, Tracy, Jack, Brian and Chris for all your help setting up so far, I really appreciate it, it's inspiring to know I have great people around me from the beginning.

We Are Low Culture Poster

Low Culture's a new web site launching in West Yorkshire, it's all about music and the arts. It's not online yet, but check out the Low Culture Facebook site the real site goes live in October and it will be www.wearelowculture.com.

The brief for this was pretty laid back, I wanted to work something around the idea of 'Low' and 'Underground', and started work on something that was quite a direct take on that. I'm actually really proud of this piece because rather than coming from a starting point of something I'd seen or a piece of stock photography it all came from my head and a blank sheet of paper.

I wanted the objects to all represent a part of the sites focus and culture, some of them are obvious like the instruments and comic (American Splendour - my favourite, RIP Harvey Pekar), but others like the Viewfinder and kite hopefully offer an insight into the idea of writing styles and perspectives of the contributors.

Each layer was built up with textures blended on top of one another, the sky was drawn in, and the grass was created using a Photoshop brush. All the objects were found on Google searches and I chopped parts of them away to make them look half buried, then shaded around the back of them and Vivid Lighted the shade to tone it all back in.

I'm also pleased with the 'lead line' on this, it happened quite naturally, trailing from the kite down to the logo was a bit of a happy accident:

I love making artwork that's creating something from nothing but an idea like this, I'm really happy with the finished poster, I hope the people of West Yorkshire tear it down and blu tack it to their bedroom walls.

Brew: In The City Poster

I've started working with Leeds based label Brew Records, who I saw mentioned in an article in the NME, contacted and I've done a few posters for ALL FOR FREE! Yep, I know how to put the 'free' in freelance alright, but they're good briefs, and if the client's not paying, then it kind of gives me total creative freedom, which is worth its weight in gold to me.

This particular brief was for Brew: In The City, which is like Babe: Pig In The City, only with bands instead of bacon. There was no brief, so I decide to take it on an invasion route, like these Leeds bands were invading Manchester. My first step was to be inspired by this image from Pink Tentacle:

I liked the composition and the colours of the sky, I thought it suited (rainy) Manchester as well, so now I needed a picture of Manchester from a similar angle, I decided on this one:

After a massive clipping path, and lots of work on the colour and sharpness, I managed to get it into a similar state to the Pink Tentacle image, now I needed some texture for the sky, I've got a collection called 'Painted Skies' and used one of them for this:

I blended this in and dropped it right back so its affect was minimal, the next step was what to put in the sky as the focal point. I tried a number of things from Hot Air Balloons, confetti  and Victorian Airships, but nothing sat right in the frame. Eventually I stumbled upon this image, and it was a perfect fit:

After that there was a load of Blending, Colour Correction and they typography until I got it into the finished state, it was quite a struggle in the end, but I'm really proud of it. Brew were pleased with it and had no changes and that's where was project finished and invoic... no wait. Anyway, one day all these favours will pay off, I've been saying it for nearly ten years now, just another ten maybe? Who knows.

An Escape Plan Live Poster Two

I love working with An Escape Plan, I used to play drums for them, so I feel they're in my blood ( I hope my blood is still on their drums), and if I need inspiration it drips from their beautiful recordings.

This poster was built from a few bits I've been playing with recently. The main character is a montage of different body parts found on Google, the shoes and head are then hand-drawn in solid black to negate the need for too much detail. Then there's a grunge texture laid over the top of it to bring it all together.

The smoke is done using some really effective spray can brushes in Photoshop, and over the top of that I've laid some white particles from a stock file I have to just scruff the whole thing up a bit.

One complete idea, no amends, one sign off. My kind of job. I am a big subscriber to ditching your first idea, my first idea was to do something around this Wind Costume photo, but it wasn't working out. Nice though eh?

The poster is a companion piece to this previous gig poster.

Mongrels DVD/Bluray Artwork

I sometimes think I'm quite clever, but then I remember my younger brother, golden handcuffed to the BBC, who pay him to come up with amazingly funny ideas, and then write them, and that's what he did with Mongrels. 

Hopefully you've seen it on BBC3, Tuesday nights. It's got massive critical acclaim and really good viewing figures, so when he asked me if I'd mind designing the cover of the DVD it wasn't really a very hard decision. 

I'm really proud of this because it's the first time we've worked together professionally and it's something we plan to do a lot more of in the future, plus it's a high profile release and it might be the biggest thing I've worked on.

You can buy the Mongrels DVD by clicking this link. 

The Moons – Everyday Heroes single cover

OK, so you've got a deadline, a blank page and a lead character (Dr. Moonhead) who died on the last cover. So what are you going to do?

Well surprisingly not panic, but fill the screen red and draw. That might sound obvious, but it's not how I normally work. Ordinarily the process is driven by fear, and the idea that I just can't do it. I start by downloading hundreds of images that I sprinkle into Photoshop and juggle around until something pops up that I can feel in my chest, once that's in a state I can understand, I leave it overnight and if I still love it in the morning, then it's done. 

But this was born a different way, it practically drew itself, I'd sent it to Andy before I'd finished it, and last night it was signed off and it's literally just gone to press. If I could I'd always work like this.

I really love it, it's my favourite of all the moons work and completes a really nice run of 7 Inch single covers. Hopefully we'll be releasing them in a boxset on Acid Jazz later in the year/early next year.

Goto www.themoons.co.uk for more information about the band.

Here's all the singles in order of release:

       Torn Between Two

Nightmare day

Let It Go

Everyday Heroes

Headline headghgh

Thursday afternoon; I returned from work to see the Times and Citizen on my door mat, I took a picture of it on my phone and uploaded to Twitter.

Sunday evening; that picture will have been seen by a recorded 57,000 people, reused on The Huffington Post, The Guardian and Photoshop Disasters, blogged and tweeted all over the world and available on a T-Shirt.

But how did this happen, how do you cause a 'Twitter sensation'?

The first thing I've learnt from all of this is, if something's interesting to you, then it's going to be interesting to other people, the challenge is getting it to a wider audience. I normally dismiss these kind of mistakes, I hate the Grammar police and the Design Police, it's the kind of self righteous nonsense that people hide behind when they've got no ideas of their own. But, I'm also a massive hypocrite, so I figured other people might want to see this huge, hilarious cock-up.

I started by Tweeting and Face-booking my find. Keen to expel the idea of it being fake, I called my post 'This is honestly the cover of the Times and Citizen'. This was picked up by a few friends and the Twitpic (the mark I began to measure from) began to clock up hits. After an hour or so I decided I'd retweet it to journalist and TV personality Grace Dent, I kind of had a feeling she'd enjoy this mistake, and guess what? She did, and retweeted it to her 17,000 followers. The picture had soon received around 15,000 hits, this continued through Thursday night and into Friday when it got it's big break. I received this email in my inbox;

Peter Serafinowicz had picked up the story and retweeted it to his 391,212 followers, things then went ballistic, the numbers jumped from 10,000 to 20, 30 and 40,000, and the story started to get away from me. It was popping up on blogs all over the world. I was getting mentions on Twitter at an astonishing rate, and it was starting to get picked up on some of the big news sites. The first was the Guardian Media Monkey.

Then on Saturday, the big time, America woke up to the story and it broke on one of the biggest sites in the world, with an estimated 10m hits a day, The Huffington Post ran the story, with my picture, and a credit linking into my Twitter profile. With the hits peaking at 57,000 they started to trail off as the story no longer belonged to me, a Google or Twitter search on 'headline headghgh' listed hundreds of stories. People claiming to have broke the story, taken the picture or that is was a fake! The Huffington Post was calling it a 'Twitter Sensation', and it really felt like it was.

The whole thing was exhilarating, there were times when I felt bad for the newspaper I must be honest, but an interesting and more serious story started to emerge from all of the frivolity. Apparently the Johnston Press Group that owns the paper has recently made a large number of sub-editors redundant and replaced them with a new system called Atex. This allows journalists to place their own headlines straight onto the paper, and apparently it's been causing problems all over the place. You can read more about that here. My story was starting to be used as leverage in a campaign against JP bosses, and was beginning to be heard by the right people. So, gratefully I decided something positive was starting to come out of it.

That night, laying in bed thinking about the whole debacle, I was trying to think of ways I could have monetized the image rights, and made some money, but it was to late now. But just maybe, in the aftermath of the story I thought I'd better be the person to make the official 'Headline headghgh' TShirt. With a new found optimism I figured you never know how big something's going to be and went ahead and did it, now, you can buy an official 'headline headghgh' tshirt from Mysoti.

So that, I suppose was my 15 minutes, it's dragging on now, and everyone's bored of hearing me go on about it, but I still think it's absolutely fascinating how one day you can take a picture on your phone in your home, and 2 days later it's worldwide being looked at by millions of people. If you think something's interesting then there's a million other people who'll agree with you, you've just got to find your own way of getting it out there, just don't get obsessed with looking for it, it'll find you.