Cadbury Poster at Pearse Station

This was a photo I took at Pearse Street train station (Dublin) on the way home from a trip out to Blackrock which I posted photographs of last week. I think that was the one nice day we’ve had since the start of summer. Anyhoo! It’s of a vintage Cadbury print advertising their chocolate. There’s always a lot of construction work going on in the station. I’d never seen this before so I think it must be something they’ve uncovered as they were doing work but it’s probably been visible a long time now.

I’d love to know how old the poster itself is. I think it should be in a museum because even though the station is sheltered, it’s quite exposed. Then you know you would get a some information on it too like what way it was printed etc. I tried to compare it to other Cadbury posters on this great Cadbury timeline to get a rough idea but I’m not sure, early to mid 1900s anyway!

Going Nuts with Photoshop Many Moons Ago

This was a second year of college project. That feels like a million years ago now! This image was part of a booklet but the rest of it is pretty horrendous to me. I can’t bare to embarrass myself by putting the rest of it up but I actually really liked the colours in this one and I’m also mad for symmetry, so up it goes!

It’s not really like any of my other work. I wouldn’t often heavily work in Photoshop, especially at the time. A few tweaks on things here an there sure. But I guess I just wanted to try do a project using it fully. So it’s a bit filter-laden there. I think everyone needs to do things like this to figure out Photoshop though.

Basically it was part of a concept that every memory has a song for a small booklet. So I made five images to illustrate that point and I did it through photo collage. So I combined photos I had taken and things related to photos like frames, negatives, cameras with things related to music like CDs, tapes, vinyl, gig tickets, MP3 players, headphones etc.

Jazz Festival Posters

These are some jazz posters I did for the Tour America office in Cork while the Cork Jazz Festival was on. They promote the less popular city destinations in southern America. I decided to go with the jazz style instead of the typical American fare. Key to this look was a sparing colour palette, asymmetric design, black and white photographs, musical reference and an art deco font to reflect the era of the 20s that spawned jazz.

My First Print Advert

This was the first print advert that I made at Tour America, and also EVER. It appeared in the Sunday World sometime in October last year. It was definitely a challenge trying to get all that text to fit into a limited amount of space. Especially when some columns had more text than others even though they had to fit into the same dimensions. Fort Lauderdale & Cruise is not the easiest title to wedge into such a teeny space!

A lot of work went into preparing the ad because even though you get given the dimensions and the number of offers, you have to make do with placeholder text until late in the week. I think they do this because prices change all the time and obviously the best deals make the paper. But it means you’re doing a lot of guesswork initially and rejigging afterwards.

I was happy with the end result. Although the marketing team had a few changes to make in regards to colours and images. I would like to point out that I did not willfully use stroked text on the prices. I feel very meh about the stroked text altogether.

4am In Las Vegas Voucher

This was a voucher I designed during my time at Tour America for novel, 4am in Las Vegas by Michelle Jackson. I was given the text, dimensions and asked to include a Las Vegas image. Finding the right image proved a lot trickier than I anticipated as most images of Las Vegas aren’t free to use because of the amount of flashy ads and logos in them. Tour America had a Shutterstock account so it was just a question of finding one that would fit and wouldn’t have the copyright police after us.

I designed the voucher in full colour thinking that it would be like a flyer insert that was slipped into the cover of the book. Little did I know, the day that the flyer was sent off to the publishers after having been approved by the Tour America team, that the publisher would get back in touch to say “Oh by the way, it has to be black and white.” Gaaahhhh!!! It wasn’t going to be a flyer, it was going to printed on a leaf of the book. Back to the drawing board.

The voucher looked rubbish when it was changed to black and white in Photoshop. No matter how much fiddling I did with contrast and whatnot, the Vegas photo just looked awful with the colour sucked out. So my quick solution was to get back onto Shutterstock and get a vector graphic of this Vegas sign instead. So it turned out like this in the end…

I think you still get the effect of the old style movie ticket that I used for the voucher even in black and white. The Welcome to Las Vegas sign has such a nostalgia attached to it that I went for the Americana style with the voucher using free font Lobster. It has that look of old hand drawn retro signage. I was really chuffed when they sent a copy of the book to the office so I could have a look at my work on the inside cover. And sure you have to bring it home to show your mam don’t ya?