Sparks in the Snow

This is the next MAPS single on Mute, 'You Don't Know Her Name and, actually not Sparks in the Snow (another Maps song), I just called it that because my spark for the artwork came on a beautiful snowy day back in January. Snowed-in and inspired by my muse/sweetheart Karen Anthony Cuthbert Wilson-Brown I finally found a way to create what I was looking for.

I needed to build something from the strand of the ALBUM RENDERS, but it needed to have it’s own defining look to differentiate from all the other releases.

I’m really happy with it, I was adamant that the covers should be black and white but Paul A. Taylor at Mute help to convince me I was wrong, I have a lot of love invested in this project and Mute love it, but more importantly Maps love it.

You Don’t Know Her Name will be released on June 07 and you can see a full sized version of the artwork HERE

Killing Flies

Last week Kooky Records asked to create some T-Shirts for them to celebrate their 10th birthday. They came to me with this email;

'Hi Ben

We had an of idea for t-shirts if you were still up for it: Our first ever review called the label "the sound of killing flies with a black and decker sander - NME" so perhaps a big sander squishing flies with the quote around it might be cool. Perhaps with the Kooky logo on the sander??

Cheers Alex'

It's nice when you work with people that have such great ideas, as soon as I read that I saw the design in my head. Click HERE to see an enlargement of the shirt.


STOP PRESS 24/05/07: I've just negotiated my Kooky Records contract with Phil at Kooky. As I currently do all their work for free, when Kooky make their first million pounds they're buying me a Roller.

Running on Empty

Sometimes when new scripts get developed for the BBC they want to present a logo to support them that help to sell the premise behind the show, and assist in the targeting of the proposal. I'm lucky enough to have contacts there that allow me to get involved in these projects, and this the logo for a proposed BBC 1 show called 'Empties'.

We Have Created

When you've looked at a piece of work on the screen for as long as we did for the Maps album WE CAN CREATE you get to a point where you never want to see it again. Then it goes off to print and you forget about it for a couple of weeks, until one day (when Mute remembers to send you a copy) there it is, sitting in your postbox.

There's nothing quite so terrifying as the first look at the finished piece. You're oddly desperate to find something wrong with it, and if you don’t, you find yourself falling in love with it all over again. Luckily for us, we're in love today. Sadly, this feeling only lasts about an hour. There are easier ways to experience such highs. Drinking meths, for example.

A New Region

The Region series go out on tour with Maps to give away as free CDs. The idea behind the series it to take a simple image of the planets and moons as you move away from Earth, so I started with the Moon and the most recent one was based around Jupiter. You can see the full artwork here HERE also to get an idea of the series see REGION ONE and REGION TWO

The Crusade Begins...

Maps are launching their debut album at The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Northampton and I've been asked to design the invite. I wanted to do something that looked like the church had designed and printed themselves (no offence), and that carried the theme of the Crusades that the church is famous for.

It should be a good night, it's pretty limited to about 200 people and it is invite only. If you manage to get your hands on a copy of the invite have a look at the journey of maps on the inside, or you can see the full artwork HERE