ISU Teaching Pack

This month has been quite hectic, there just never seems to be enough time in the day. I was given a brief by ISU that has taken almost the entire month. It's been challenging but interesting work at the same time.

The brief was to design various parts to what ISU call "Teaching Materials". This is basically an A4 folder filled with different kinds of documents. The folders were for handing out to prospective clients at their various seminars and meetings. The materials outline ISU's strategies and ideas about tackling problems in the care sector and resolving them.

Some of the things I had to design for the folder are; single A4 documents, 2 x multipage A4 documents, A3 illustrations, A5 flyer. I also had to design a slideshow to accompany the folder. Ofcourse, each of these elements had to have the same theme and look.

ISU 2 x 1.2m print

ISU have brought alot of work my way for their various projects over the last year and half. It seems that each time I complete a job for them, it creates a new job. It's very symbiotic it seems. They are always very pleased with what I create for them, and in return I'm very pleased to be given such cool opportunities.

Anyway, what I was trying to get at was that they liked the large prints I created for Virksomhed Vollsmose a few months back, that now they want one to promote themselves.

The brief was that it had to be subtle and artistic rather than shouting "WE ARE ISU". Designers like "subtle". The old adage of "Less is more" comes into play here, 95% of the time that's true.

I decided that the print should relate to and reflect the same design theme I used early in the year for their slideshow.

Printed at 2m x 1.2m it looks very impressive and sleek hung on one of their walls.

Hedensted Kommune (Part 3)

The third and final part to the promotional work was for me to create five promotional posters matched by theme (three of which you can see here). They had to portray the truth about the staff at the organisation. The fact that they love their job, they love their patients, and everyone gets along great. It's almost like the Cosby Show or something! Quite different to the shocking news we had here in the UK a few years back about our old peoples home, quite different.

The posters were A2 and were to be posted up all over Denmark.

Hedensted Kommune (Part 2)

I spent around a week visiting the various care homes taking photographs. Now with that part of the job done I was asked to create some promotional materials for the organisation. As mentioned before, the idea was for me to paint a new picture for peoples perceptions of care homes. Change the negative into positive.

The breif was for me to create a slide show for them to show at various events they hold, which you can download here if you wish to see. (Hedensted Slideshow)

Hedensted Kommune (Part 1)

Through word of mouth I was commissioned to travel to Denmark again to embark on another promotional project within the care sector. Hedensted is a company that run three elderly care homes in and around København (Copenhagen). They had arranged for ISU to go into each one, evaluate and then improve them. That's is as simple as I can put it, what they do is very in depth.

Anyway, part on the "improvement" was for them to change peoples perceived opinions of these places. The usual perception is that the carers don't actually care, or give any time lovingly. When really, it's quite the opposite, I saw that with my own eyes.

My job was to go into each home, and spend a couple of days getting to know the nurses and residents (to gain their trust) and take some telling photographs to help promote the environments. All in all it was rather successful and very enjoyable.

I must thank Claudia for being my interpreter, and a very good one at that.

HiSoul Society event

A nice quick and fun job for me, I was given complete freedom to create this design for an event night in a club. The brief was simple, it had to be "cool, street and funky". The imagery I used was a combination of record decks, speakers, vinyl and also created a graffitiesque backing for the events name.

After converting it to various sizes, it was finally printed as an A3 poster for in-house promotion, an A5 flyer for handing out at other venues, and as an A6 card. The A6 card I re-jigged so the text was legible.

Incidentally, "re-jigged" isn't a tecnical term, but a comical term I picked up when working with some of the industry elders a few years back.

A2 Elderly Posters

Over the last couple of months I have been taking quite a lot of photographs of the elderly, and designing various promotional material for the Danish company ISU. I was recently given a brief to design two A2 posters with the theme of "The Elderly".

I was told to be as "out there" as I wanted with this brief, the idea was for the posters to grab attention. Not to be shocking, but to be intriguing in an artistic way. It was quite a challenge as I was just given a day to do these.

Prior's Field School speech day

Prior's Field is a boarding school for girls aged 11 - 18. At the end of each year they have a "speech day" where the top student get award prizes and get to perform their drama pieces, perform in their bands, and give talks. The whole day is geared to give a good show for the 1000 strong audience of parents.

I was asked by Kinetic Event Technical Production to be part of a small team of two to run the event, my job was to film the event and project it live onto six very large plasma screens places around the hall. In addition I was using two high end broadcast quality cameras (canon & sony) and had to cut between the two to give an interesting show, rather than one static shot throughout. This involved alot of sweat and running. But it was worth it and most enjoyable. The other team member was incharge of the sound.

I will say this, the girls really seem to achieve at this school. The atmosphere between the girls and the teachers is great, and the building is incredible. If I ever have a child and she is female, then I will strongly consider paying for her education here.

Bump Bump

Over the last month I've been involved in the making of an independant horror movie short called Bump Bump. I wasn't involved in a creative capacity, however I was the lead role in the movie. It was lots of fun and very exciting indeed. I'm no way a professional actor nor do I claim to be, I just did the best I can. I play a homeless 30 something with learning difficulties.

The movie was for the Channel 4 competition for Horror Fest later this year. Aparently out of several hundred entries, we came 11th we're told. The reason we didn't make the top 10 was due to "the movie being too long". It was 16 minutes long, and the entries were only allowed to be 15 minutes maximum.

Anyway, the director asked me to design the dvd cover, to which I lovingly oblidged. I will post here the website address as soon as it's available online for download.

8 Page Sales Brochure for ISU

Another interesting job for the Danish company ISU. The brief was for me to design a sales brochure that would capture the interest of their clients, and make them memorable. We decided that the brochure needed to be imagery heavy, and not text led. All the text needed should be there ofcourse, but the imagery needed to be bold.

The brochure was to promote their work with projects for welfare of the elderly. They do a lot of work to improve the quality of life for the people in this sector of society. After a long trail of though I decided on the idea of trees, namely Oak trees to symbolize wisdom, age and health. ISU loved the idea and we ran with it.

The final print was an 8 page A4, I was also asked to convert it to a PDF document small enough for emailing those clients that couldn't make their talks/meetings.

Tårnby Plejehjem photographs

One of the residential homes for the elderly that ISU work with is Tårnby Plejehjem. Yes that IS in Danish, and no, I'm not completely sure that I have it spelled right. I was asked to fly back out to Denmark to repeat the same scenario as before, but this time insead of my subject being female asylum seekers, it was to be welfare and quality of life for the elderly.

This project for me was very challenging, we all know that the elderly are very photogenic but it wasn't that simple this time. When photographing the elderly I like to sit down with them and talk to them, listen to their stories (of which they have an incredibly amount). Not only does this approach engage them with you, and gain their trust, it culminates in succesful images. My problem this time was that none of these elderly folk understood a word of English, so I couldn't flirt with old ladies and gain their smiles very easily. There was only one gentleman that could speak english, and he was a war veteran who fought for the Danish Resistance. Fascinating.

ISU branding slideshow

The Danish company ISU were impressed by the slideshow I had created for the exhibitions. They asked me to take some more photos of their staff in working situations and come up with a slideshow to aid their branding. Take a look.

The slideshow is up on their website for all to see, and is also shown whenever they have a their sales meetings.

Rewkachu exhibitions in Denmark

The work I completed last month for the commendable project Virksomhed Vollsmose - creating a prosperous future for female asylum seekers, if you haven't read the entry - was recieved so well that they asked me back to Denmark for further work. It was very exciting for me because they were all so interesting, and it was something completely new for me.

They asked me to host my work in an exhibition. One which would be shown at 6 different locations around Denmark. This involved me choosing my favourite photographs from the previous job and design a layout for them as an exhibition. I chose twelve images, and for cost reasons decided that I could make them work in A1 frames, alternating the amount from 1 to 3 images (see the photo attached). I also decided that for maximum impact I should print two of the images on canvas to hang from the ceiling as 2m x 1.2m prints.

I was also asked to create a slideshow of images that would cycle through and repeat throught the day. This had about 100 of the colour photographs I had taken previously on the ladies.

This was a truely rewarding experience, the women involved had been subservient and down trodden their entire lives. Now here they were in a new country with a fresh start, and what's more, they were the stars of the exhibition. They were as proud as I was.

I must say a thank you to those employees that set up the 5 other exhibitions as I couldn't stay in Denmark for a full month at that time. And also a thank you goes out to Claudia for taking the snaps of the exhibition for me.

50 Page evaluation document

I know this must sound a little strange considering that I love taking photographs and being creative with design, but I really enjoy designing minimalist, corporate books and documents!

ISU briefed me with such a job recently. They needed a neat and professional looking report to show what they had achieved with the Virksomhed Vollsmose project over the last year. In recent years they had simply created a document themselves in Word, which had suited them fine. But now they have much more success and a wider audience they decided to step up a notch.

Here you can see three of the pages selected at random from the 50 page Evaluation Report which they printed. Everyone agreed that it was much more professional and interesting than their previous years. I enjoyed this brief as it allowed me to get stuck into text alignments and punctuation amends. I love sorting and organizing, maybe I have a problem?

Event-O-Scope branding

Event-O-Scope is a new company for which I've been designing the logo and branding. At the moment I'm sworn to secrecy in regards to the details of the company (until its launch ofcourse). I can however show you a few of the twenty logo designs that I sent to the client. This is the first stage of the design process. I'll keep you posted.

Photos coverted to posters

The Virksomhed Vollsmose photographs that I took in Denmark were recently converted into posters. These have been printed in 4000 copies and are currently being distributed all around Denmark.There will also be 6 exhibitions of the photogaphs around the country from April onwards. I'll keep you posted.

Design in Danish

While in Denmark I was met with a rather different kind of challenge. ISU wanted me to design an A4 4 Page invite for one of their up and coming projects. In itself, it's the kind of job I'm used to. However, I was in Denmark and therefore had to use their computers. The operating system was in Danish and so was the design software. I surprised myself, I designed the whole thing without being able to read the software menus. I guess I proved to myself how well I know the software by using the shortcuts and simply remembering where things were in the menus. Danish isn't like French or German, it is quite different to English, so this was definately a challenge.

The end result was ISU being extremely pleased with the design makeover I gave their invite, aswering our question of "can we work together despite the language barrier?" and also me feeling rather proud of myself.

ISU have showed alot of interest in using me for other work. Fantastic, and they are also a great pleasure to work for.

Virksomhed Vollsmose

Virksomhed Vollsmose is a Danish project set up by ISU (Insitut Serviceudvikling a/s) and part funded by the EU. The projects' aim is to help asylum seeking women - who have come from various parts of the world and terrible situations - resettle and start a new life. Starting again with nothing must be an almost impossible task. What Virksomhed Vollsmose does is work with the skillsets that these women have, and then put them into a business perspective. For instance, alot of these women have children, and therefor have various family skills. Using this idea, ISU started the organisation Virksomhed Vollsmose. Two parts of the project are a catering company, and a sewing company. These women are now working in a friendly and safe environment, with likeminded women - using skills they are familiar with - All helping them earn money to get their lifes back together.

I was lucky enough to be commissioned to travel out there to take some promotion photographs. The images would be used in various things like posters, adverts and an exhibition. I was out there for a week in the company of these women, many of whom spoke no english. They treated me so kindly and even fed me free arabic and vietnamese food! I had a great time!

Rewkachu enters Europe

Over the new year break I visited a friend in Denmark. It was my first time over there, and it has to be said that it is quite an amazing little country. Not only did I have a great time while there experiencing how they celebrate New Year, but I was also asked to revisit them this month on a professional level.

I was asked to do several photography jobs by an organisation called ISU, Institut for Serviceudvikling.

The photography jobs included: working situations, employee portraits, various building shots and product photos.

Candour Illustration

I'm always extra thankful for these kinds of jobs. Ones in which I get to create artwork completely from scratch. In short, these jobs are a lot fun.

Candour, the advertising agency wanted an advert to show how versatile they are. The idea was to have a swiss army knife type device made from their logo. This would appear large on a simple full page advert in various art publications. My job was to create the device to be used. As I said, it was a lot of fun.