If you want to come along to check it out tomorrow (April 4th), it’s all happening at the Coronet Theatre in Elephant & Castle from 7:30pm to midnight. Tickets are around a tenner from Amiando (for 10% off, use this code: DWDK707N), or about £15 on the door. I could do with a cheering section, so come on down!

© Rob Barrett Design.

While browsing the beer aisle in the supermarché here in the French Alps on Monday, on my first skiing trip, I received a phone call from Lizzie at Germination, the company behind the London version of the event.

“Good news — you’re in!” A great way to start my holiday off, knowing that I’d be one of the eight starting competitors in the showdown on April 4th. Plus the prizes are something to look forward to… My poor Wacom pen is gaffa-taped together now, so the replacement tablet and pen’s going to be very welcome.

If you’re around in London that weekend, come on down to Elephant & Castle and support me and the other guys (but cheer louder for me!).

For those of you interested, here’s my process for getting ready for the tryout…

Initial Sketch (24/02/2009)

I received an email last Tuesday night letting me know that I’d been accepted for a trial to enter Cut&Paste, and that I was to come up with a 15-minute design on the theme “Bliss”, with an optional challenge that it should be a t-shirt design.

Out came the notepad straight away, and after a brief brainstorm, I came up with this, which is a kind of ‘blissful unawareness’. The guy’s strolling through some post-apocalyptic landscape while listening to music, which transports him away into his own mental paradise.

Practice #1: 15 mins (24/02/2009)

This dreadful first attempt is a clear indicator that I had no idea just how much can be achieved in 15 minutes if you don’t panic and rush…

Practice #2: ~30 mins (24/02/2009)

Whereas this one’s an example of what can happen when you get carried away and decide to ignore the timer. Actually, it was a case of taking the image as far as I would have liked it, and seeing how long that took.

Practice #3: 21 mins (25/02/2009)

Refining the previous image, trying to find ways to cut some minutes off my time. It’s getting there…

Practice #4: 15 mins (27/02/2009)

The next couple were strict 15 minute tests with my decent design, trying to get as much done as possible while still furthering the illustration.

Practice #5: 15 mins (27/02/2009)

Practice #6: 15 mins (28/02/2009)

My final practice, finished about 10 minutes before I had to leave my flat for the real trial… I realised that I could save myself an easy minute or two by drawing the smoke with my Wacom instead of a series of ellipses — believe me, over 15 minutes, a one minute time-saving is a massive advantage!

Trial Entry: 15 mins (28/02/2009)

And finally, the final submitted image. I’m mostly happy with how it turned out, but there’s a few things I would have liked to have done a little differently. Unfortunately, the trial took place on a Mac — currently as a PC user, the keyboard layout and the terrible default Mac mouse got me pretty stressed out, which means I didn’t get to intersect the man’s shirt, nor did I have time to clip the background to a t-shirt shape. In fact, with 20 seconds remaining, I went to crop the image and couldn’t find the icon in the CS4 toolbar, so my final submitted image was actually about 10,000 pixels square. Oops.

© Rob Barrett Design.

OK, it’s just a holding page for the time being, until I build the site (and that probably won’t happen for at least a month or so — March is already filled up with holidaying and moving house), but it’s good to finally have something more substantial than just an idea in my head.

To reflect that I’m trying to involve myself in less web development, and more work involving graphic design and illustration, NHC will be geared towards generating clients requiring need print design, and digital design that doesn’t involve much in the way of back-end coding. I’ll still be working on web development for a number of existing clients, but I’m not going to be actively pushing this service.

This site, Rob Barrett Design, will remain in order to showcase my personal projects and to host my blog (I’m still undecided as to whether I should blog under RBD or NHC, so I’ll keep it here for the time being), and it will likely shift towards a role that supports my search for a full-time design job in London.

I’ve got a nice UPrinting giveaway planned to mark the unveiling of the finished NHC site, so keep your eyes peeled for that!

© Rob Barrett Design.

For those of you who don’t know what Cut & Paste is, it’s a design competition taking place in 16 cities across the world in which 2D, 3D and Motion designers battle it out in 15 minute create-from-scratch rounds in front of judges and a crowd of fans and well-wishers. Over a few stages, the contestants eventually get whittled down to one grand winner (for each category), who — along with receiving some sweet prizes — gets a place to compete against the other 15 winners in a global final in New York.

So, I’ve been given the theme for Saturday’s audition, I’m coming up with ideas, and I’m having a go at some speed sessions in Illustrator. I’m down to 30 minutes to get from blank page to presentable design, so I’ve just got 3½ days to knock 10 minutes off my time now…

© Rob Barrett Design.

I’ve put together a set of 10 vector symbols for you to use in whatever you like. Commercial use is fine, but for my own curiosity, I’d appreciate it if you let me know where you’ve used them. Enjoy!

© Rob Barrett Design.

I just found out a few minutes ago that my Twitterlove Bird won the Styl.eti.me Vector Twitter Mascot competition.

Thanks a lot to the competition host, Roger Byrne (@styletime) and the judge, Chris Spooner (@chrisspooner).

I’ve been following VectorTuts in my RSS reader for a while now, and I often get excited about a tutorial description, only to find it’s a ‘PLUS’ — so this prize is certainly going to come to good use!

Nice work, all the other entrants as well — lots of varied styles there!

© Rob Barrett Design.

Given what my holidays have been like, I think this wallpaper I made this morning is a fitting tribute to the pastime I feel I’ve been sticking to most for the past couple of weeks… So, join me in raising a glass bottle to the next twelve months — here’s hoping it brings bigger and better things for all of us!

I’ve catered for the most common resolutions of my visitors, according to Google Analytics, but if I’ve missed out a lot of you, let me know and I’ll add more sizes.

© Rob Barrett Design.

I’ve been playing around with Flickr the past few days, and I came across an account that I set up months (possibly years) ago and have never used (actually, I discovered two accounts of mine, one last updated in 2005, but I’ve deleted that one now).

As I’ve been back at the parents’ house with my laptop which I rarely use, I thought I’d have a scan through and see what I’ve got lurking on it. It turns out I had quite a few illustrations that I’d started in Illustrator, but never quite got around to finishing, so I’ve spent the last couple of days polishing those off, and making a new one to go along with them, and I’ve uploaded them all to my ‘new’ Flickr account.

You can see my illustrations here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/robbarrett/

Feel free to add me as a contact there. I may well add the rest of my portfolio pieces up there at some point, and integrate Flickr into the overhaul I’ve got planned for this site, so if you’ve any suggestions on useful Flickr plug-ins for WordPress, I’d be grateful to hear them.

I hope you all have fun on New Year’s Eve in a few days’ time! See you in 2009!

© Rob Barrett Design.

After a long break, here’s Day Four. Apologies to anyone who’s been watching this series of posts — the whole project fell apart around a little over a week ago, due to a combination of a heavy end-of-week workload, followed by getting a dose of Man Flu, which I’m still getting over.

Aside from the fact that I don’t have any further artists to showcase (next time I’ll be prepared far in advance, rather than on the day that I need to start!), it seems a little pointless to continue when I’m on Day 4 on December 15th, so I’m going to call it to an end and wish you all a very merry Christmas.

As a parting gift for this series, take a look below at the fantastic work of Cory Godbey, an illustrator at Portland Studios…

Day Four: Cory Godbey (Portland Studios)

© Rob Barrett Design.

Day Three, and today we take a short detour from the festive theme to showcase a website design by MCG Studio. Why? Because it’s a pretty site! Take a look, and maybe let Josh know what you think of it.

There are still spaces left in the calendar, so if you want your work showcased like this, then get in touch. More details below…

Day Three: Josh McGlinn (MCG Studio)

Josh McGlinn

This project was for the AT&T Center about 6 months ago. Home of the San Antonio Spurs and located in Texas, this site needed to appeal to the Southwestern style of the city while clearly promoting sporting events and concerts. I was contacted by carbonhouse (www.carbonhouse.com) to design the website while they handled all development. I’ve worked on several projects with them and it was good to work on this exciting project. Although carbonhouse loved the design and fought hard to keep most aspects of it, the client requested a number of revisions.

The AT&T Center website (www.attcenter.com) is now very different from what you see here. It was one of my favorite designs and I appreciate having this opportunity to show the original layouts for the site.

To see more samples of my work, please visit www.mcgstudio.com.

The places are starting to fill up, but I’ve still got plenty of blank windows — if you want to spread some Christmas cheer and show off your Christmas illustrations, get in touch by leaving a comment below or sending me an email!

© Rob Barrett Design.