My year out in industry may have started off slow but things are good at the moment. I have several placements lined up for next year in Italy, which I am very excited about! More to come on that as it happens; I will be in Pesaro, Italy from beginning of January, working at Marco Morosini's Studio.

Currently I have just finished my fourth week at the How To Spend It Magazine, at The Financial Times in London. I am staying on for a couple more weeks up until Christmas, as I'm really enjoying myself. It is a small-ish team of people: Editor, two designers, two picture researchers, a subs team, and some admin people, but everyone is very friendly and they all work suprisingly hard! Everyones on the go all the time, it's a busy time of year I guess! I've been helping out around the office with various issues, as at the moment they are working on one every couple of weeks, rather than monthly. I have been doing some page layouts for the January and February issues; it'll be very exciting to see my work in print! I've also been to a few photo shoots, a couple of product shoots at studios and a portrait of a couple of art dealers.

My sketchbook (above) is looking a bit worse for wear, nothing a bit of tape and sprucing up can sort out, and hopefully it'll last me until the end of year and develop as I go on. It's been really good to see the magazine industry and they way the world works outside of university. I look forward to my last couple of weeks at the FT and going to Italy (if not slightly nervous about that!)

I have updated my site again, after realising there were some serious problems with the previous version in Internet Explorer. I could not see a way of fixing these problems without seriously changing the site, so decided to go with a whole redesign! Plus the previous design was too slow, the images took too long to load, and there was too many clicks needed to do things.
This new design houses all my work on one page, and only loads each image as you need it, therefore a lot quicker! You can click an image to read about that project, or click one of the links at the top to zoom to the image and expand it. To view more images of the work, click on the 'View Work' links at the bottom of each description, and then scroll through the images!
Hope you like the redesign; let me know if anything doesn't work for you!

Some more freelance illustration work for www.reallyrich.com

My current sketchbook. 1/8 through, hoping it will last my whole year out. It's already taken a battering however...

My newly designed business card: 85 x 55 mm. Grey board with yellow adhesive vinyl. Info stamped with black ink. All handmade, and each one completely unique.

I just had to jazz up this boring birthday card. Only slightly though.

Check it out; click the image...

This is a quick piece of illustration work I did for a friend's website; www.reallyrich.com. They wanted a cute and friendly chiwawa (correct spelling? I have no idea). I designed this from a sketch and then brought it into Illustrator. My first serious use of the tricky pen tool, so I'm pretty pleased overall. What you all think?

The polished sketch: two ideas, in and out of the heart. Which is better?

An idea for development of my I Love London project. Playing on stereotypes. Any suggestions?

A little update. Inspired by London's 2012 logo design, its youthful, fun and bold, but slightly more friendly and rounded. I like to think anyway. Comments always appreciated.

This is my final development of my public installation for the Cities brief. Check out the Cities link on the left for a more detailed description of what I wanted to achieve. I have left the installation in place overnight to see what affect the wet weather will have, and take some more photographs tomorrow morning.

I nice immediate outcome of the project: A man approached me tonight, to ask what I was doing and what it was all about. It was nice to inform him of the history of the area and he was very impressed and pleased with what I had done!