This Is A Voice: Book Design And Illustration
With three-colour spot printing throughout (and a fourth on the cover), this book takes the reader through 99 exercises to train, project and harness the power of the human voice. The fun of this project was actually working within those colour limitations as well as finding a way to fit lengthy instruction into a functionally concise handheld format. This book is a tool for those who are serious about increasing their vocal skills. Under the creative direction of Marianne Dear, I strove to present the authors' complex content as clearly as possible while keeping the book's design playful and hopefully standing out from other titles on bookstore shelves. Once the hard cover edition with lovely yellow endpaper sold out, we also released a softcover edition with the same lush spot colours.
Book art videos: I've always been obsessed with books, but maybe more literally than literarily. I like to physically take them apart, see how they are made and try to build my own. I remain fascinated by the this simple form, and it continues to be equally a source of inspiration as well as an outlet for personal expression.
We Were In The Nest: Art book:
A true Philadelphia story written by Elisabeth Lifsey. An exercise in multi-spot coloured printing without any printing. All done with coloured paper, cutting, hole punching, fountain pen writing, acrylic ink splattering, waxed linen Japanese style bookbinding. Lettering based on the Philly graffiti font combo: Curve Tallhand and Curve Punchline.Screenprint book art and Schwabe Digital logo:
Deep dub digital design development through the analog alchemy of my sketches, scribbles, screenprints and scientific research behind the Schwabe Digital logo. The hype: Schwabe Digital thoroughly developed an audio mixing and mastering software plugin, Gold Clip, which creates a versatile, high-precision clipping / amplitude saturation effect called GOLD and a peak contouring effect called ALCHEMY. This video begins with a famous-culture-vulture-eye-view of a portion of the great South-London-centric album cover illustration of Dub Duel by Anthony “Lovey” Lovindeer for Hawkeye Records. The track used is Lab Explosion off the Scientist side of the battle vinyl. En guarde! And Delia Derbyshire soothes with her siren's song as we happily crash upon the rocks of sound.Early 2000s designs and art books:
Scream Richards is in my ear about his Sweet Soul Sisters mix as I record some handstyles at The Gathering in 2004. King Razz came through that night. One of the first times I drew original custom letters for a “job” was for said mix CD. After that, I force the viewer to endure my toy tags, as I put to practice the lessons of flow taught in the previous clip by Seus, Satan, BX and others. Then, a flash of Denaro before a glimpse of 84, as Blaak Tha 9th Man and his equally legendary mom team up to introduce his undefeated Welcome 2 Soulville mix CD, with more letters by me, but the original physical CD had a design by brother Panek. Then, uncle Darryl drops by Ynot and my crib to bless our practice room with a toxic-fume-stanking Cornbread before we head over to the basement of Skeme Richards to work out some cuts, and finally end up at The Gathering again to represent while Skeme plays the music we were living for. The next treat comes from an old roll of film that I developed to find photos of my early design work from then, collabs with Soul One, Amani Olu, Jeff Cylkowski, Ryan Hendon, Jeanine Lee, Fatnice, Pose 2, not to mention a flip book of myself from 2001, because, well, ego, and we end on a photo for those who are in it. I love you all, and thanks for sharing the space if you were there.