D&AD Pencil for 'ReTweets of Love' Campaign

I've only just learned that the series of 7 pieces I did for Diet Coke via Droga5 won a Wood Pencil in the D&AD awards, for 'Art Direction for 'Poster Advertising'. Er yeah, they forgot to tell me that!

Here is the award story in full, and a reminder of the pieces. (Unfortunately the illustrators involved are not credited.)

The only one that didn't make it to a final was the jewellery - I designed 4 pendants in lettering for one of the Tweets, and 3D printing company Shapeways were going to make it a reality, right until the last minute when they pulled this design out of the collection, I think due to the concerns of technicals and legibility.

Those pendants are shown here for the first time though, with me modelling practice size experiments!

D&AD Pencil for 'ReTweets of Love' Campaign

I've only just learned that the series of 7 pieces I did for Diet Coke via Droga5 won a Wood Pencil in the D&AD awards, for 'Art Direction for 'Poster Advertising'. Er yeah, they forgot to tell me that!

Here is the award story in full, and a reminder of the pieces. (Unfortunately the illustrators involved are not credited.)

The only one that didn't make it to a final was the jewellery - I designed 4 pendants in lettering for one of the Tweets, and 3D printing company Shapeways were going to make it a reality, right until the last minute when they pulled this design out of the collection, I think due to the concerns of technicals and legibility.

Those pendants are shown here for the first time though, with me modelling practice size experiments!

Me and Coke: Part 2!

So fast forward from 2006 to nine years later and I’m drawing for Coke again - this time, a very clever campaign which took the Tweets of selected lady Diet Coke drinkers, and turned them into physical objects sent as gifts to them Tweeters themselves, under the hashtag ‘ReTweetsOfLove’.
They had no idea they were going to receive them!

They took the form of T shirts, pads, ice sculptures, PARK sculptures, jewellery and prints, even a digital display in Times Square.

I did 7, with one was cancelled; a necklace, which would have made a fiiiine piece of work but is posted here anyway, as me and the art director did a lot of work on it so it deserves an airing!

Here’s my poster, from sketches to completion. The Tweeter’s name and original quote had to go in verbatim (which meant including any strange grammar or punctuation issues - sorting that one out was an interesting discussion for a grammar perfectionist!)

Then there was the iPhone case:

A T shirt:

Two notepads (sent to writers!):

And then the best bit, my own Coke can!

And here is the necklace which SO NEARLY made it…technical issues with the fineness of my calligraphy meant that they used a font in the end, and chunked it up a bit so it could be made quickly with fewer technical concerns, but here is the set of four necklaces designed to be worn together, on my ‘borrowed’ décolletage (sorry lady whoever you are!)

The necklace gave me a right old taste for 3D printing though, so this isn’t the last you’ll hear of THAT!

Thanks Bernstein & Andriulli Coke, Droga5 and Fast Horse for a great job, and nice to have a solid collection of pieces.

Me and Coke: Part 1!

I’m about to post some ads I did for Diet Coke recently, and I suddenly remembered while prepping the files that I’ve worked for Coke before. These pieces are not in my folio as one was a ‘below the line’ thing for internal use, and the other wasn’t used - the product they were going to launch never was! Here are some of the pieces from those jobs.

You can tell how old they are as the line quality is very specifically from a certain era, but I like them a lot - they have a particular cheeky/crude energy. That machine thing with the scientists is bonkers. I miss drawing this way, all action, no pencil sketch, no micro-art-directing!

Also - interesting, look at the comparison of the Head with a job I did nine years later for The LA Times - they’ve never seen this piece as it has never been featured in a folio, but there’s a lot of similarity.


Bet you can’t guess what new drink they were considering going into…? Red…green…white...

Nice to observe the energy and quality in these, though I really didn’t have a very good scanner at the time. I drew a car, and it doesn’t look like it would instantly crash!
This was all to do with chilling’ with your cup of...

Then there was this, an internal set of illustrations about the design development process. That type!

Finally, here’s the head I did for the same job, again about developing ideas, and the one for LA Times years later. You can see that I was trying to get to grips with Illustrator at the time, so I offered them both an Illustrator version and a Photoshop-from-drawing one - I was never sure which I preferred (probably the ink) and I don’t know which one they chose in the end!