Artist, record label boss and rapper Sage Francis has just unveiled his new logo, over 20 years since I first fell in love with his records, 18 years since I did the biggest art project of my life on his work, 16 years since I did a piece of art that wasn’t meant to be a logo but became one, 17 years since I did his first proper ‘new logo’, and ten years since I designed him another ‘new logo’. Like the artist himself, this is a logo — and a relationship — that doesn't stay still!
We never sat down to do a logo, to brainstorm or sign an NDA or moodboard or A/B test or anything else. It’s been a fully organic journey. The first one was actually a piece specially created for the 2007 Manhattan outing of our big Sage-inspired show, If A Girl Writes Off The World (a pre-Adobe Dreamweaver-built site will open up. I built it myself and it’s so poignantly 2007). It was picked up and put onto some of the hoodies in Sage’s Strange Famous merch range — best-sellers at that. Detailed and writhing, it was made with a very fine Nikko-G nib and black ink. The original is actually very small, and framed in our hallway.
The second was kind of accidental as it was made for the cover of Sage’s 2007 album Human The Death Dance. It just kind of…started to get used on things, posters, ads, posts and merch. In the way that a logo does, I suppose. Made with an inkpen and nib, it featured sad faces and a minimal slope, just designed to peer over the shoulder of the man himself, next to a watermark-like Death. With hindsight, it was flimsy and odd, but then again…unlike a lot of my formal client commisssions, I hadn’t ‘sat down to design a logo’.
The album cover. Which was almost……this one instead.
The one that came after that was also for an album, 2014’s Copper Gone. It formed part of a single piece of ink-on-paper art but once again lived a life of its own, and served as Sage’s identity for the ten years prior the current one. I almost can’t believe myself the huge spans of time I’m casually throwing around here, by the way — but those are the dates, and this is the longevity of it all.
Again if I’d known at the time that this would be deployed in the way it was, there are things I’d have changed — but would it have improved anything? Not sure. Really not sure, but at some point someone filled it in and made it solid — which wasn’t a cool move, and around that time I began thinking, I really need to do that properly, or scrap it and do the whole thing again.
Eventually I did. I can’t remember whether I just did it and sent it to Sage with a note saying ‘this really needed doing’, or whether he asked — it doesn’t matter — but the outcome is this one. This time I *did* sit down to ‘make a logo’ from the roots put down by the Copper Gone iteration, but clean and clear. I faffed and tweaked and moved vector points and smoothed out bezier curves then undid it all, and repeat, eventually creating so many versions I think we actually really should have done some A/B testing. But there it is.
There are still things I’d change, even now, and it may or may not serve for another ten years. But I like the organic and slightly clumsy way all of these were done. They sort of ‘happened’, which is very different from the art-directed, purposeful, accountable way I do my other work.
The final. I think. Not sure. I like it. Sage likes it. But do I like one of the other versions more? We can always use one of those…can’t we…I think. We fly in the face of your Logo Rules, sir!
When Sage posted it to the fans, most people just loved it and started slapping money on the counter for the T shirt. Someone said ‘Francis’ reads as a completely different word. Someone else said having seen it they’re now expecting a country album (which I applauded).
I still look at it and see a curve I would change, bits I’d move, and I stare at it till I’m logo-blind. But honestly, I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Thanks Sagey for the wholesomely organic way we do things, every time.
I’ve just posted a new project in my folio, and although I’ve got over 20 years of pharmaceutical work hidden away in a password-protected archive for all manner of legal reasons, this one I was able to share. And I’m glad, because it was both a privilege and a responsibility to work on.
We watched 'Still' last week, the documentary about Michael J. Fox’s life as a person with Parkinson’s Disease. We were shown the myriad clever, agonisingly secret techniques he developed to hide the effects of the disease for as long as he could. We watched the trembling left hand always given the task of holding something or gesticulating, and the way he exaggerated his already restless manner of moving through the day, in order to fold any twitches or unexpected movement into his famously energetic modus operandi.
It was funny, educational and extremely moving, and the moment we were shown his hands beginning to move I thought of this project.
Commissioned in 2020 by Saatchi Wellness, it was designed to communicate the effect that Parkinson’s Disease has on motor control through the power of handwriting. My job was to develop a set of authentic handwriting styles for a set of fictitious patients, each with unique characteristics, that are shown both subjected to the effects of Parkinson’s, and after treatment by the drug Duopa.
Although it isn’t suggested that the treatment returns the patient to pre-Parkinsons handwriting, their motor control is shown to be sufficiently improved as to render their writing readable once more, communicating a sense of a return to empowerment and confidence. The stories of each individual are based around achieving modest, important tasks such as picking up a grandchild, or dancing with a partner.
From the Duopa project, working with Saatchi Wellness: the patient’s handwriting is challenged. It had to be hard to read, but not difficult, and accurately demonstrate the potential effects of the condition. You can see this image in use on the website.
The conclusion to the story is the patient’s handwriting showing the improvement in his condition; he’s able to hold and read a book.
The two shown here are from a larger set we created, with a complete font developed for use on behind-the-scenes assets. The research and development for this project was extensive and very moving at times, and I cried a few times as I channelled everything I’d learned through my fountain pen into the words of the imaginary, but also very real, patients.
Part of the developmental work for this project. A small section of the font I created for the Duopa project, including the range of variations that are possible within the scope of the disease’s effect on the patient’s ability to write. This is manifested in the changing ‘T’s, ‘U’s and ‘V’s shown here.
Some of the many. many experimental pieces created for the Duopa project, showing notes and adjustments. Each of these handwriting styles must be thought of as ‘a voice’, rather than simply ‘this is how they write’.
I do a lot of what might be called forensic lettering work — maybe that’s too exacting, perhaps ‘reproduction lettering’? — whereby I’m called on to recreate the handwriting of a famous person, or someone deceased (sometimes both) for advertising or TV, film or books. Some of won’t be seen publicly. I’ve also done a lot of work that involves developing handwriting for fictitious characters — in fact, I’m doing one right now, three different ‘voices’, three different ages and situations, with a different choice of writing implement for each.
An example of the specialist lettering work I do. Here I’m recreating the handwriting of the physicist Paul Dirac, one of the founders of Quantum Theory, for use inside and outside the book, using just handful of the extant references available. The age and style of fountain pen used were of great importance too.
It’s harder than you think to override your own muscle memory and install new clicks and flicks of the wrist, different angles and pressure and descenders, a way to dot ‘i’s and cross Ts that’s someone else’s, and to keep it consistent — while tying in any historical factors too. In fact, it feels more like acting than design or lettering work, and it’s a million notebooks away from calligraphy. Once I’ve got the writing locked down, I can get into that costume and ‘be’ that person for as long as I need, even switching between them day to day. (There is, incidentally, always a voice that isn’t mine that accompanies the words I’m writing.)
But I love the immersion and focus that comes with the task, and the attention to detail. It’s very different from the kind of lettering I might make for an editorial or a logo, where I throw my brush, nib or Apple Pencil across the page with energy and only the loosest idea of outcome.
If you would like to know more about this type of work, please get in touch. In fact — write me a letter; I’m far more likely to respond…and who knows, maybe I’ll do it in your own handwriting.
Images shared with the permission of Saatchi Wellness.
My new logo for the US state of Maine has begun to roll out in the last few weeks, and it's a thrill to see it.
It began in early January 2023 with an email from creative Jordan and VP Neal at Miles Partnership, asking if I'd like to have a stab at updating the logo for the state of Maine.
Now all I know about Maine can be summed up in three points: 1. Our friend, the poet Andrea Gibson was born there. 2. It's huge and beautiful, and 3. Stephen King!!!
I said yes and within a couple of weeks was hashing out some proposals. The Miles team had made my job easier by carrying out acres of research with the inhabitants of the state itself. They'd got a stack of feedback on what they liked about the original logo, what they didn't; what living in Maine meant to them, what they thought of when they pictured their home state, and hundreds more answers to in-depth and nuanced, thoughtful questions.
The existing Maine logo looked like this:
The core feedback was that the logo felt "outdated, bland and uninspiring, particularly among Maine visitors". When asked what the new logo should be, the answer that came back most often was "bold" - but with the near-unanimous caveat that it should nod to the traditional nature of Maine.
The findings came to me in an extremely thorough 45-page document which formed the backbone of my thinking. 'Organic, craft, charm, outdoors, nature, wood, trees, breathtaking, rustic, authenticity and sustainability' were other pivotal words which came out of the research.
And that was plenty for me to go on! I had the final logo in mind almost immediately, but presented lots of different looks to the team. After all, sometimes it's just as useful for the client to see what they DON'T want as it is for them to see what they do. All but a couple were analogue, made with ink, crayons, pens and pencil on paper, I was keen to communicate movement with solidness and history; contemporary energy with tradition.
A still from one of the WIP videos I made while working on the logo.
While wax crayon, used to make a resist version.
Here are a few of those initial suggestions - there were a LOT. I do this because, at this stage, the client could spot ANYTHING in an idea which triggers the final outcome - so I tend to leave very little out; I guess you could call this a brainstorming of sorts:
Preferred options were 'put to research', and after a few weeks a trio was isolated for further tinkering. And by tinkering, I mean the start of the fine-tuning process - without knowing which the final choice might be. This is things like examining the weight of letters, kerning, trying different options on 'e's and capitals, whether on a single line or a little bumpier, like this exploration:
Often at this point the client's curious to see how my very analogue work will look when transformed into vector art (presuming we're working with art that wasn't created digitally to begin with).
This isn't a 'click the button' or 'apply that filter' step - rather, I do this via a series of processes which sensitively and carefully change the format of the piece (from pixel to vector) without changing its nature, preserving its human warmth, detail and idiosyncrasy. Without blowing any of my hand-sketched trumpets, it's often why people come to me for logos; in a sea of Canva-generated/off-the-shelf/plastic-looking logos they want something very obviously crafted by human hands, but which functions in every format, at every size, and performs in any technical, screen or print environment. I've been doing that a long time, and it's surprising how that need has remained consistent.
Here you can see a close-up of a very carefully vectorised version of this inky option:
This option from the second round of ideas was chosen to get through the third round. Made with simple, freely-drawn capitals in ink on paper, it worked as well in colour as it did greyscale and vector:
And as a partner suggestion to this I made a version created separately with ink and pencil to hint at cut wood, wood and trees being things that emerged as strongly connected to Maine and eliciting affectionate responses in their research group. Here's the raw art before any refinements:
Watch some of the process here:
At this point, I got The Tingles - when you know underneath you've cracked it, and you desperately want the client to agree with you...but you daren't hope too hard, because your experience tells you it can go completely in another direction! But those Tingles came when I played with these layered and coloured versions. Suddenly, I could see this on all the signs, the site, the products, the T shirts...
The team liked it. But there was one more thing. I was aware from the start that when I said the word 'Maine' in my mind, it was actually 'Maine.' - with the full stop. I couldn't stop seeing it this way. I felt it communicated a confidence and pride in this single-syllable name, and suggested that the state was everything you could need - the full stop made it both a name and a statement.
"Where you from?"
"Maine."
And so it was added to the next round. Would they go for this punctuatively unusual choice?
The answer was YES. And so, over the course of six months, our logo was born, and final artwork was prepared in myriad formats and al the colours of the new Maine branding guidelines. In its final iteration, the logo is currently working its way over the next few months onto hundreds of products, signs, printed materials and online platforms, but you can see it right away on the visitMaine website, and on these satisfying examples.
To my delight, as well as embracing my 'thing' for the full stop, they're using both the flat-colour version and the textured version together, deploying them in different environments, and that in itself is unusual. I applaud their boldness!
If you live in Maine and you see it about, please take a snapshot and send it to me! "Out in the wild" has become a cliché, but only because the thrill of seeing one's work out doing the job it was created for never gets boring.
Not for me, anyway.
Thank you to the brilliant team at Miles Partnership in Denver for bringing me on to do this prestigious project, especially VP Neal and Jordan, and thanks to my agency BAreps for their patient, professional cheerleading!
Not being able to ‘get to it’ has hassled me for ages but, as I finally get my assorted notes and thoughts assembled, I realise that quite unintentionally, the right time is now.
I’m writing about AI. Of course I am. Not only am I expected to have an opinion on it, as an artist (I do), but every man and his hamster knows about AI and moreover, also has an opinion on it. This is no bad thing; but you know that something’s ‘made it’ into the public consciousness when you’re asked to talk about it live on local radio; literally ‘the man in the street’ invited to share their thoughts on the matter, before switching to Sarah on the mic.
But more on that later.
In 2015 I began to play with Google’s DeepDream. Our mate Kev told us about it. You had to input a picture and wait for it to render — a long enough wait that you could go away and do something else, like have dinner and sleep, as opposed to Midjourney’s amphetamine-rush of fired-out images made in moments. In fact, facebook tells me I uploaded it on 30th July, and got the result on 2nd August:
So this was my first AI picture, and it’s a horrifying belter:
Kev, Sarah and Leigh, after 3 days Deepdreaming.
We laughed and pulled faces at it and then I forgot about it, and about AI for the most part other than following a few scientists on tumblr who were doing silly and very funny things with neural networks; getting them to write recipes, for example (generating the bewilderingly unappetising meal equivalent of what you see above) and poems. I would chortle at their painfully awful but nearly-there attempts, helplessly projecting human concepts like ‘trying really hard’ onto what I knew was not an earnest seven year old, but early machine learning.
A bit later I got to try out Adobe’s Neural Filters in a new PS update. I shoved a picture of my face into it and played with the sliders that deployed artificial intelligence to change expressions and age. The results were deliberately awful, because I knew I would never actually use them, so I went to extremes and pinged them off to family for Whatsapp LOLs. Regardless; the very gentlest of alarm bells was ringing. If I can change a face to this extent so easily, what’s to stop someone else changing a face for nefarious purposes?
Fast forward to 2022. Our mate Kev Again — featured previously after his mauling by DeepDream — mentioned an AI programme he’d been using to create pictures. He was having rather a lot of fun with it, and I had a go myself. Hm, I thought, yeah, it’s quite fun! (“Pin all the things”.) But I couldn’t really see how I might use it in my work, even if I’d wanted to, and besides, my contracts for client work are pretty much 85% a giant sign held aloft that says Thou Shalt Not Submit Any Work That Might Ever Have Had Anything To Do With Anyone Else Ever.
So, NightCafé Studio was also just a toy, then, and I forgot about that as well. Besides, at that very moment we were too busy getting excited about NFTs to think about artificial intelligence (more on THAT later, too).
And then; out of the blue I got an invite to beta test an app called DALL*E, which made artificially generated pictures. As you might be able to tell by now, I’m never one to back away from the thrill of a new piece of kit or technology, especially one so apparently BRAND new that it isn’t even out yet, so I seized the day. I asked it rather predictably at first to make a picture of ‘a night-time street scene in an 8bit art style’, because I was deep into my vaporwave playlists that week. And it did. Not bad, so long as you don’t want to print it at any sort of acceptable resolution or pass it off as your best work:
I did it again; this time, ‘shopping for pens and ink in a haunted pen shop in the style of Aubrey Beardsley’. Hm; it made a decent fist of that too. In fact, I liked them quite a lot. They had a certain charm.
After a great deal of messing about, I realised I should really have a look at whether it could reproduce anything that looked ‘like me’ — I don’t mean ‘a portrait’, though that’s happened since (it didn’t work very well). I wanted to know if the system could produce work that looked like mine. For the first time, I got the barest inkling — pun entirely inktentional - of the theory of a notion of an idea of a suspicion that this might, at some point, perhaps be a threat.
Let’s go in with possibly THE most widely-known of my pieces of work, I thought. Let’s ask it for a cover for To Kill A Mockingbird. I could see from the results exactly what it had been trained on — I could even name some of the illustrators — but nothing was usable beyond rough concept sketches or layouts, with useless lettering.
I then asked for ink drawings of Christmas iconography — I thought I’d try some old and very mainstream work that’s been out there a long time. And it made some alarmingly naturalistic looking stuff. Immediately I was put in mind of all the times I’d been ripped off in the very early days of doing hand-lettering, by people and companies who should know better but were seeing hand-drawn type for the first time (we’re talking late 90s and early 00s) and weren’t thinking that lettering was capable of being plagiarised as well as images.
…hmmm.
Despite the minor shudder, I kept on. I asked it to make words with ink. Totally illegible, though the energy was kind of there. Then logos. Then ink bottles. The cross hatching. Then illustrations for horror stories for kids…in black and white. Then landscapes in ink. And on it went.
It did them all, with its only stumbling block being that lettering was entirely unusable and hands were snigger-at-the-screen terrible. This was still only about a year ago, but even at that point a tiny but chilling voice was whispering Banksy’s ‘Laugh Now’ into my brain.
Over the course of the rest of the year I kept on playing. Kev Again was integrating AI into his image-making, and nicely so. Hands continued to be grim. But humans in my creative orbit began to make uneasy noises. I love tech, especially the sort that enriches my work and my process — whether the ancient Adana, my 80s Gocco printers or the latest Adobe feature, and I’ll be damned if I’ll be threatened by any of it; try it, learn it, and find out how I can deploy it. Another thing in the pencil case. But…but.
Never mind. On with the work. As well as playing with AI I was simultaneously immersing myself in the Web3 world, buying crypto, building an NFT collection and spending sometimes too much time in Discord because such things, just like Apple Pencils, Photoshop and magical things before them, are always just the next step in how we make, share and sell things. Nothing phased me — peak excitement was reached when minting a hotly-anticipated NFT after getting a whitelist spot. WAGMI! It was later stolen, but…yep, more on that later.
Around summertime I dove into Holly Herndon’s Spawning project. A lifelong lover of electronic sounds, I knew her records and was enthralled by her conjoined-twin Ai+Holly progeny. At the same time, she and her colleagues had developed Have I Been Trained?, a site which claims to allow artists to choose whether or not their images can be scraped for use by Stable Diffusion, MJ and OpenAi. I thought long and hard about what to click, yes or no. Did I want my images included in any large image training model? In what feels like a lifetime ago, I had a rather generalised feeling at the time that I didn’t want to be *excluded* from the world of AI, so clicked ‘Yes’. But that wasn’t actually what was being asked, and by the time I understood the specifics of the question some time later and went back to change it to a ‘No’, the site had inverted its system to one where, rather than choosing to opt in or out, you had to manually seek out any images of yours in the system, and ask for them to be excluded one by one (that’s still the system they’re using today).
I carried on. Towards the end of the year the world of commissioned work began to feel distinctly odd, with subtle but long-in-the-making shifts in modus operandi, their origins in the pandemic, finally manifesting in the way that work was coming in (awkwardly, unpredictably) and being managed (slowly and painfully). I began to see colleagues talk publicly about work being ‘weird’, and turnover being down. Against this landscape, my social media feeds began to fill up with people excitedly spewing out picture after picture made mainly in Midjourney, some calling themselves…artists. I, businesslike as ever, shut down the usual quarterly roundup of IP violations on Redbubble and Etsy, annoyed by the usual brazen help-yourself attitudes to artists’ work in the public domain — something which feels quaint now — and continued to stay abreast of the NFT world despite a sobering wallet theft, a gifted NFT stuck in cyberspace and a shady ‘buy it back’ deal with an anonymous stranger.
In the run up to Christmas I was busy with the annual seasonal promotion, the demands of the daily Inkvent project and assorted client jobs. I didn’t ‘play’ with AI again until the new year, using it to generate some atmospheric 80s-style pieces as refs to try and capture the vibe of some upcoming illustration work, and to experiment with layouts for a looming book project. We used MJ to make targets for my Dad’s shooting practice — zombies who may or may not look like certain politicians, all OK because of course they weren’t real people — and introduced my Mum to AI, whose first Midjourney piece was a beautiful Japan-inspired coastal landscape rendered in ‘ink’. She was fascinated, and loved the process — “I can put away my paints now’”, she said. “So can I”, I said, trying not to let inherited gallows humour extinguish her lovely anticipation.
I made a part-AI-part-Photoshop-part-Procreate leaving card for a mate, and used it to help make a silly birthday card for my sister. It was useful for generating some demographically accurate reference figures for an artwork I was making. And I did some more of those 80s experiments. I even started an Instagram page to capture the best ones. Kev Again continued to deploy AI subtly and successfully in his design work, and although I still hadn’t found where AI might ‘fit’ into my work, I still felt like it was a friend rather than a foe.
And then…and then. I joined the Midjourney facebook page, and at the same time, people calling themselves ‘professional prompters’ (to a great deal of derision and hilarity) and ‘AI artists’ began writing about how ‘real artists’ had somehow been gatekeeping, hiding secrets and lying about how long it took to create work. Look! many of them said; it IS easy after all! How dare those artists charge so much to do this!
I love this picture. She’s beautiful. I made her. Or did I? I didn’t. I asked a machine to make her, in quite a lot of detail. I worked with a machine. Or did the machine work with me?
Almost overnight, the world seemed flooded with articles about AI: the threats, the warnings, rabid defence of it, declarative statements against, over-confident opinions thrown in all directions. People fought to defend their use of AI, to explain why human artists didn’t deserve to keep working, and others outlined how the world could never be without human-made objects and pictures. My stateside agency had begun to talk about it in their newsreels, and my Medium feed was suddenly full of tediously repetitive articles loudly telling me how to generate five-figure sums with a ChatGPT side-hustle. How to generate pictures in Midjourney and flog them back to people via Adobe Stock. How to bypass concerns about copyright to make AI pictures to print and sell on Etsy…oh, yeah, Etsy. Back to that old chestnut.
I talked about AI at length with my agency’s boss, collected opinions and followed real-world artists creating beautiful work using AI as one of their tools, trying to keep healthy, future-positive role models in my line of sight. I remained determined to be neither for nor against AI, neither scared nor cultishly absorbed by it. And despite wanting to pontificate in the public domain many times, I held off writing about it, not wanting to add another voice to the clattering hubris of prompters calling themselves artists, and artists throwing shade on users; the world did not need another article wanting to sound knowledgable and finite.
So I didn’t, until a single tweet brought me to the BBC’s attention.
Chapter 2, in which I talk about my research with regard to AI + copyright + IP, follows.
