When a mining company client needed to showcase the results their services and technology had delivered to their client, they needed a standard template to communicate the story, the readings, any necessary graphics and all relevant call-to-action/contact information in a handy double sided form for distribution both online and in...

Back when I first started using Adobe Photoshop I fell in love with layers and what they could do, so a lot of my work unwittingly referenced the multiplane camera technique pioneered by Walt Disney Studios in the 1930s, working on different but complementary elements and seamlessly blending them for...

A printed, four page A5 brochure marketing the services of a university-based innovation hub promoting, advocating and educating about the use of AI in industrial, government and education sectors. This was an existing A5 design that needed some layout tweaks, a rewrite and the use of updated photos from more...

An ad agency I worked at got a brief from the state health department for a double sided DL brochure containing information on how kids with lower body disabilities should exercise to retain mobility and strength. As you can see there are no pictures in it, if it was ever...

A colleague who launched a charity to help stunt performers affected by adverse conditions connected with a filmmaker who was interested in making a documentary about how badly the entertainment industry treats stunt players. I christened the project Safety First. We threw our lot in with his project and to...

This one’s a little bit of a cheat, but it represents my salvo into a longstanding debate. The selection and layout of the typography was done by me, but the image was generated by artificial intelligence. Does that mean it isn’t legitimate art? If I’d been the art director of...

The client’s website was already built, so I didn’t design the overall UX and page template layout, but I had to deploy text, graphical and video content to showcase one of its events. It shows that I can apply design skill to content management on a preexisting template by making...

Yep, the end result of this project was as exciting as the title makes it sound. And I don’t even have an interesting story or inspirational anecdote to go along with the concept, execution or end result because I don’t remember where I did it, who the client was or...

This is actually the second iteration of this sales document from the web development and design agency where I served as the print management guy and art director. The first one was a cool little A5 stapled book (but do you think I can find that anywhere?) To be honest...

One of my favourite kind of projects is the art direction, design and layout of printed periodicals. So I had a great time working on this project for a year or so for a fellow technology journalist who’d started his own magazine about film and videography technology. Not only did I...

Submitting pictures with a story when you’re a freelance journalist is a must to impress your editor (and give her less work to do herself, a surefire way of assuring repeat business). But sometimes – like here, where I explained and rounded up the various digital video and music player...

A classic example of serendipity. Playing with two bulldog clips during some forgotten meeting or presentation ages ago, I realised how cool they looked when locked together with one arm extended on each. I set up a photo shoot on my kitchen table, selected a sparse typeface, an avant-garde way...

Before the media industry shot itself in the foot by ignoring the internet, the Fairfax Newspaper Publishing Group used to put out monstrous weekend editions in Sydney and Melbourne that included the Good Weekend Magazine (each one still exists, though they’re a shadow of their former selves – like all...

This one’s a bit of a cheat because I can’t claim to have designed it completely – it was originally built in Squarespace, where templates for websites are predesigned. But in my own defence, I wanted several aesthetic changes I had to spend considerable time talking to their tech support...

I and a coworker at a video store we both worked at remain friends to this day, and just like I wanted to be a reporter in the film industry, he wanted to be a screenwriter and director. We actually both ended up living and working in Hollywood for a...

Back in 1997 I spent a small fortune on an Apple PowerMac G3 desktop, all the requisite graphic design software and a printer big enough for A3 paper to set myself up as a contract graphic designer, and psi Publishing and Design (no, the lower case ‘p’ isn’t a misprint)...

Thanks to her green thumb, my nearest and dearest carved out a niche selling plant, flower, fruit and tree seeds online. Originally it was run on Facebook, but eventually we knew we had to build a dedicated ecommerce portal both to streamline the process and further establish the business as...

A colleague I knew and liked from my days in advertising stayed in touch over the next few years, and he always wanted to start a small business producing tourism and lifestyle guides in several local areas of Sydney where we both lived. He eventually set up the venture and...

My own website to showcase all my work as a reporter, going back to 1997 when I had my first ever article published. It doesn’t include absolutely every piece of content I’ve created for media both online and off all over the world, because I’ve forgotten more short roundup pieces,...

A former work colleague launched a series of local government area tourism and lifestyle publications in my native Sydney, and after getting along well while we both worked in advertising he asked me to join him in creating and running them. You can see one here, but we also needed...

A thoroughly lovely coworker at a weekly business newspaper was quite politically active and as an expat of Afghanistan, had been through one political upheaval after another. She was launching a charitable/awareness organisation for her contemporaries who hadn’t been as lucky, weren’t as educated or didn’t understand how to access...

A lot of the workload in my day job as a writer is corporate and commercial communications, and whenever I’d embark on a drive to win more of it, all I had to send prospective clients was links to the work when it had finally been published or – because...

A good friend and short filmmaker decided to release his own work the old fashioned way, on a DVD, and since I’d created the logo for his nascent film production banner I leaped at the chance to do bona fide movie packaging. Taking cues from the widespread standards and conventions...

The web development and design studio where I both started my career in online design and furthered my career in print design created a standalone, code-free way to build your own website years before WordPress or its user-friendly competitors existed, and because we were talking to SMB users we needed...

A client had a printed desk planner project and this graphic was a (pretty way out) concept to mark the current month in the side matter beside the calendar grid. The whole project was a remixed into another form so it didn’t go ahead, but I’ve always liked the slightly...

I’ll always have a soft spot for printed advertising design, and this three-fold DL brochure marketing a tour operator specialising in educational experiences in Bali is a great example. As well as ensuring aesthetic appeal, this sort of thing is also an exercise in maximising the available space and knowing...

A photo manipulation and layering exercise, with multiple elements from various sources. The angel is my own gorgeous little girl aged around nine at the time, wearing a simple white dress and shot in the studio of a photography colleague. The fairy wing was found in a Fremantle craft shop,...

An unsolicited pitch for Tourism Australia, which I felt needed a completely new approach after several years of failed and controversial attempts to market Australia to international visitors (luckily we can rely on the famous friendliness of our people, our natural beauty and diverse landscapes to speak for themselves). I...

If you know anything about me, you know the 1984 sci-fi adventure The Last Starfighter is one of my top five favourite films. And if you know anything about the movie, you know the hero, Alex Rogan (Lance Guest) lives at the Starlite Starbrite Trailer Court in the fictional town...

An architect asked the design studio I was working at to help with a rebrand and we did a new logo and a suite of stationery and printed marketing collateral. As I’m wont to do when unrestrained, the ‘several-words-as-one-with-different-fonts-or-colours’ bug bit, but the reason I use it so much is...

I was sitting next to an American lady at a writer’s festival of all places, we got talking and somehow go onto the subject of design and advertising. She mentioned she was starting a business (I can’t remember the industry), we stayed in touch and I had a go at...

I fell in love with the potential for digital graphic design when I first entered the creative world of advertising – I was a regular old typesetter, and being a proper, paid graphic designer is something you have to work up to through talent and advancement. But that didn’t stop...

I’ve always been a frustrated book designer – the only chance I ever really got was the design for my own self published novel, which you can learn more about right here – but as a dedicated reader as well as a designer I appreciate the creativity that goes into...

Back in around 2000 I decided to pick up an old idea I’d had from a couple of years before to start reviewing movies I saw and liked. At the time I was a fledgeling journalist and figured any writing practice would make me better. And being a devoted cinephile,...

The brief was to create a handbill-style leaflet for a newly forming ad/design/PR agency to send to potential clients, and they wanted something that was functional more than flashy, which was their brand profile. Why they engaged another graphic design agency to come up with material to advertise their own...

My attempts to make a viral movie meme. I simply took the original poster art and scattered characters from the popular Rovio phone game around the white space. The challenge from a design point of view was matching the word ‘Angry’ to the typographical font and characteristics of the original...

The early 2010s saw one of those crazes that sweeps the visual world in magazines, advertising and everywhere else you care to look. It consisted of taking a long shot of a cityscape or landscape and creatively applying a blur effect to the top and bottom of the image, making...

A client who owned a motor scooter brand (think Vespa) wanted to position itself as a lifestyle, not just a transport machinery provider. Think of the way Apple makes computers and phones artistic objects, or the way a Bentley will get you to the shops just as fast as a...

As you’ve no doubt noticed, this is one of the least visually exciting samples of work on this website. It’s not intended to showcase my creative prowess but my skill in a quite forgotten art – typesetting. As the area I started in, it was always seen as a bit...

When my better half started casually trading plant seeds on social media, she didn’t know how fast or successful it would become, and I spent several years telling her we should build a dedicated ecommerce portal to not only make it all more official and mature but streamline the operation...

A good friend happens to be a NSW copper, and with a background in psychology and a unique perspective on the emotional toll of policing, he and a co-worker intended to launch a business facilitating frontline workers with mental health and trauma care. Life got in the way as it...

A domestic and commercial building company approached the web design studio I worked at to renew their branding, marketing and website. The six examples here were some of at least 30 variations we did for them, and they not only didn’t like a single one of them, they couldn’t tell...

A magazine publishing concept cover I came up with; a title half about film releases and half about home video/DVD releases, upside down from each other and ending in the middle, if that makes sense – when you’d read ‘//film’, you’d flip it over and start reading ‘//disc’ from the...

Yes, this client did offer to take us hot air ballooning in the verdant southwest of Western Australia. Hell no, I didn’t – you wouldn’t get me in one of those things for all the tea in China. I don’t think we ever got the chance to take them up...

A print and networking technician needed a logo for a rebrand, and rather than specifically refer to paper or printing, I went for something that was technical and precision but didn’t reference any particular technology or area of computing or IT itself. The company still exists, and the logo –...

As a freelance journalist, a big part of the job that makes your editor’s life easier (and thus gives them further encouragement to hire you again) is to provide images to go along with your copy. In researching and writing an explainer/how-to on the purpose and process of graphics language...

While working at a web development and design studio we maintained a close partnership with a managed IT services company – sharing business development opportunities and indulgent lunches among staff, etc. We rented our first office in their premises and I think later they shared a couple of directors and...

A handful of years after starting out in my career I somehow ended up back in recruitment advertising, this time for a very small team of HR management consultants. I don’t remember who this client was because we did this kind of work so seldom and I’ve never seen this...

I once did a few weeks of contract freelance work at a mining technology provider thanks to a creative staff agency that’s now defunct in my particular market (but you know their name if you’re in the industry). Most of the work was quite routine so I just put my...

A staffing, HR and corporate change consultancy approached the web design studio I worked for looking to establish its branding and online presence. The business is still going strong so they obviously know what they’re doing, but I like to think the exceptional logo design I did (which they’re still...

My self published novel, available now for a very competitive price from your favourite ebook seller (just check out the site for buying options). As a longtime wannabe author and a graphic designer there was never any doubt I’d pull out all the stops to make this the best I...

When the web development and design studio I worked at hosted the first ever WA Web Awards (the ‘WAWAs’), it was our job to come up with the marketing material inviting participants to submit and vote. An A4 booklet was produced to outline the procedures, rules and regulations, and this...

This is one of those rare designs where you get the unique thrill of seeing your work out in the wild (unless you’re Rob Janoff, who designed the Apple logo, or that design student who did the Nike logo). The client was developing a piece of commercial real estate, and...