During Spring I spent quite a bit of time at Saint London, and greatly enjoyed my time there. They relaunched their site in part to celebrate being awarded Agency of the Year by both Revolution and NMA, and had this nice idea of including and thanking everyone who’s been part of their team of late, including ‘lil ol’ me, by creating the ‘Face of Saint’. Conflicting schedules have meant that I’ve not been back there for a little while now, but genuinely hope I’ll get the chance soon, as they’re a lovely bunch. Oh, and it was also nice of them to ask me to illustrate their monthly poster in May.

Given the long delay, we wanted to ensure we did something really special, and decided upon a ten day tour of China followed by a week in The Maldives. Essentially we were away for the whole of June, and you’ll have to forgive the brochure-speak, but we definitely got the ‘amazing experience of a lifetime’ we were hoping for. Starting in Beijing, we made our way to Xi’an, then to Chongqing, followed by spending three days on a cruise of the Yangtze, before finishing up in Shanghai. China was intense and inspiring, and The Maldives as beautiful and peaceful as we could have hoped for. The new Nikon D7000 came in extremely handy for capturing all the numerous sights, which I’m currently collating, curating and colour-grading on Flickr. And for those of you who hate clicking and like scrolling instead, I’ve put a few of my favourites at the end of this post.

Alright, so no-one likes to hear someone banging on/borderline boasting about an amazing trip, least of all me, so I’ll shut up presently. Still, upon returning from those exotic climes, following a brief stint on an ongoing design project, it was suddenly our first anniversary. As good fortune would have it, some friends of ours were to get married down in Devon the day before, so we spent the preceding week in St. Ives, Cornwall, almost as if to reassure the UK coastline that we hadn’t forgotten about it since spending ‘quality time’ with it’s more exotic cousin the month before. We’re nice like that.

So, ultimately it was like having two months off, and despite a bit of design work in between, and a couple of drawings on the beach, being away from the Mac and the monitor glare provided me with the break I really needed. I’ve come back with fresh enthusiasm, and fresher eyes too no doubt. The main thing is, I’m already stuck into some exciting new client work, and I hope to share some of it soon. Until then…

Then, since February, I’ve been working fairly solidly with Saint London on a number of projects, again all of which need to stay under wraps for the time being. Coming right up to date, I’m just starting an interface design project Sky, an iPhone app project, and also something pretty exciting with Mother too. Naturally, I’ll share some actual design work when I can, but I didn’t want you all to think I’d been slacking!

In the meantime, here’s a set of personal experiments with some photos I took in East London late last year while, appropriately enough, working with AllofUs. Sometimes it’s worth taking a late lunch after all…

The game is essentially, to coin a fashionable phrase, a ‘de-make’ of the opening of The Force Unleashed II (the game which it was designed to promote), where Starkiller is trying to escape from Kamino, the water planet you may remember from Attack of the Clones.

The simple gameplay falls squarely into the running genre, from Sonic the Hedgehog all the way to Mirror’s Edge and Canabalt. The player runs automatically and has to tap space to jump and avoid obstacles, the aim being to run as far as possible. If you choose to play as Boba Fett, you can try and run further than your friends and ‘capture’ them, thus adding a social dimension to the challenge. When your force or jet pack meter is full, you can double-tap space to create a force push as Starkiller, or get a jet pack boost as Boba Fett.

I had no involvement in the game design per se, but my role was to create all the game assets, including the animations, and to design the interface and menu system. Needless to say, it was a blast to create a pixellated Star Wars world. The game was developed by MBX Games, and it was cool to see it all come together with some retro music and authentic Star Wars sound.

As I mentioned in that post, Alex visited the set of the IT Crowd a couple of years ago when they were shooting series 3, to hand out his ‘We are Phi’ t-shirt designs to Graham Linehan and the cast. Here he is pictured with Graham, which I know was a very proud moment for Alex.

When he passed away, I met a number of his friends and family at his funeral, and we wanted to make sure that we tried to do something positive with the creative endeavours he had started. He was in the process of giving his ‘We are Phi’ pattern (which takes inspiration from the golden ratio and can be seen in the photo above) to various illustrators and designers to see how they would develop/and or devolve it.

At that time the illustrator James Downing, aka Couk had created a custom version, and it turned out that his was the only other design that was printed onto tees. You can see his awesome (and rather sweet) version below:

We had been hoping to be able to produce more tees in the future in memory of Alex (and would still like to), but then earlier this year I heard that they were preparing to film the fourth series of the IT Crowd. This was just through following Graham Linehan on Twitter, and then ‘IT Crowd Support‘, which was how the production team were trying to find lots of nice things for the set. It seemed like a natural thing to see if I could get some of the remaining t-shirts sent to the set, in the hope that one of the characters might wear one during one of the episodes.

I got word back that whilst they liked the design, Graham didn’t feel that a t-shirt featuring it was appropriate for Roy’s character. Still, they asked if I’d be able to send the pieces as posters instead. I got straight in touch with the ever-reliable Ripe digital, and got James’ custom design printed at various sizes, along with the original design, and then two more custom designs. The first one you can see below was done by the talented Alex Smee, and takes the piece in a totally different direction by creating a face. This is what he had to say about his creation: “I made my ‘vs Phi’ illustration for Alex in late 2008, when he was commissioning the first series of custom tees. It’s a portrait of / tribute to Japanese painter Kawai Gyokudō of whom I’m a fan, and it was literally a case of having been looking at his work earlier that day before starting the illustration. When I decided to try and turn the Penrose pattern into a character, the angular edges seemed perfectly suited to illustrating an older face, so with Kawai Gyokudō in mind I thought that would make an interesting approach. In the end Couk’s excellent design was the only one to be printed, but I’m really pleased that Alex asked me to make a design and, most of all, that he told me how much he liked it.”

The second one, the apple, is my own creation, which came about after I started thinking about what I could take away from, rather than adding to, the original artwork. The only new element I added was the apple stalk, and for everything else I simply re-coloured or removed the existing shapes.

Sorry, I know this is rather perambulatory, but I am getting to the point I promise! So (as you know from way back when you read the title of this post) it turns out that the artwork made it into the show, and we couldn’t be more stoked! This is such a perfect way to pay tribute to Alex, who was a huge fan of the series. And in case it wasn’t obvious already, I am too. All three pieces are in there, and here are some screenshots from the 360° set panorama to prove it!

The first episode can be watched online now, and we get a glimpse of all three pieces. Alex Smee’s artwork in particular can be seen nice and clearly on the door behind Roy’s desk!

So there we go then. Yes, it’s just background artwork, and naturally the vast majority of viewers won’t notice or care, but for myself, and for Alex’s friends and family, it’s such a fantastic thing. A huge thanks to Chris Jones at Talkback Thames for his support, and naturally to Graham Linehan, for creating such a great show in the first place, and for being happy to have the artwork on the set. I really enjoyed the first episode and can’t wait to enjoy the rest of the series!

We know that there are other designers out there who may have started on their own custom designs before Alex passed away. If that’s you, or if you know of someone, please do get in touch, and maybe there’s more that we can do to honour his memory.