Irish comedian and filmmaker Andrew Nolan’s new production company “Bad George” needed a logo that screams ”I’m here!”, which this one does, quite literally. The feisty brand mark depicting Curious George’s terrible cousin, represents an irreverent, primal urge to express oneself. This cheeky squirrel monkey, combined with bold letters and a golden ochre accent colour, creates a rare treat within logo design: confidence with a pinch of self-deprecation. This was delivered together with a hand animated vanity card, adding a brushy and raw stop-motion veneer that perfectly matched Bad George’s "perfection-through-imperfection" frequency.

As part of an upcoming TV project, I was tasked with creating the logo for a dubious in-world enterprise, a la “Los Pollos Hermanos”. Whatever these guys are cleaning up, it sure isn’t mould. The task at hand was simply to create the logo itself, but what I delivered was instead a fully-realised graphics bible, complete with mockups for their trucks and gear. I wanted a logo that at first glance looks cute and friendly, with a sunny bright yellow squeegee diligently sweeping through the black “o” of the wordmark, leaving a negative, bright stripe. This idea of white stripes through black introduces a play of light vs. dark, and allows for instance, for an almost hearse-like truck enveloped in black.

This top-tier UK comedy talent pool has always used a clever zig-zag pattern wordmark combined with a shimmering gradient, but my redesign kicked it up to the next level. The gradient went from all cool hues, to now spanning all the way into a fiery hot orange, which pops out against the now, dark, background. This shifted us from a gentle, early morning sky, to a late-night out at the comedy club, painted with neon and spotlights. What makes this rebranding even crazier is, of course, the thickness and 3D perspective introduced, which gives a movement and boldness to the design that just screams “show business”!

This online tool for viewing, creating and collaborating on timelines and retrospectives, needed to do a lot. For the veritable smorgasbord of functionalities, the presentation is remarkably simple. With a modern take on the Bauhaus movement of the 20th century, the overall presentation is deliberately anachronistic. The timelines themselves are constructed by round-cornered blocks, connected by thick, vertical lines, and the “T” in the wordmark echoes this look in a playful way. Every single icon on this website is handmade, inviting us to a “what if” scenario where the early modernists were tasked with making a social media interface, down to every arrow and loading animation.

Noden, meaning “The Node” in Swedish, is all about spreading knowledge about HR. For their rebranding, I made a clean, simplified wordmark with the “o” being a colourful dot, representing their node within the matrix of organisations in Sweden. The confident dash of warm orange says “look at me!” with a friendly wave, and makes for a logo that fits into a corporate environment without looking too corporate. This is a graphic identity with remarkable longevity and simple finesse, down to the slightly muted blacks and whites that give a comfortable, eye-strain free experience of their online reading material.