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!

LA Times' Festival of Books

One of my first jobs this year was to create these A2 ink-filled illustrations for the LA Times’ Festival of Books, and its sister festival After Dark.

The job of the images was to help the organisers promote the sunny April event with a set of word-driven illustrations. They’re on the site, on posters, in national newspapers and on t-shirts and all manner of other souvenir and promotional things.

They’d seen the image I’d done for Family Circle on my B&A folio page, and loved the organic colour, the pen-to-paper authenticity, if you like, of a piece done ‘in one take’. There’s a certain energy in pieces which are done quickly like that, with as little faffing about* as possible (*British term), which retains the spontaneity of whatever rough you did to start off with.

I asked for a list of terms to compile (stressing that you can never have too many) and I went right ahead and pencilled out the roughs at a large size. The first piece, 'Hail the Written Word,' was approved pretty much right away, with a fine tune here and there where the open book meets the heading.

The "Inspire Your Fire” piece took a bit longer as the headline needed three versions before it was signed off as ‘right' – and the burst of words actually went though four incarnations. Spontaneity can be very difficult to manufacture, and sometimes, it’s better to just stop torturing the piece you started with and start afresh.

Studio assistant, Graham helped with the Festival After Dark microphone. It was good to have a team of two on this to get everything in on time (it was a fierce deadline), and we swapped tips on digital ink (his tips) and using Illustrator (my tips).

I really enjoyed using ALL THE COLOURS IN THE INK BOX (nearly) and slaving over a hot sheet of A2. We hadn’t started time lapsing at this point, but if we had, it would have been a great one to capture! Yep, the back of my head, for eight hours...