I'm a graphic designer in beautiful Dunedin, New Zealand. Thanks for visiting.
Here are some of the things I've been working on. Here is a little bit more info about me.
Beer and science and horticulture guy Jamie McQuillan is winning awards for his sour and wild beers. As the name might suggest, Cell Division is a bit nerdy and a bit dark and punky and music-loving. I am stoked to help design his labels.
Jamie always has a good idea for me to work from, so he makes the design easy and fun. The ones range from quick loose designs for tap badges, to labels for bottles and cans that take a little more figuring out.
Among his upcoming projects is a strong dark malty stout. Maybe. Pretty please!
Painting by Donna Demente
Thankyou Payroll is the story of a ‘tech startup that could’ – a small group of people worked hard with complex tech (and a very steep learning curve), they looked after their customers, and grew it into a healthy company providing a great service for many businesses and NFPs.
I worked there from 2017-21 and was lucky to be able to help with design for an employee payroll app, a new payroll UI (in progress), a marketing site, a whole bunch of documents, design for events and lots of miscellaneous stuff. It’s fun and a real privilege to be able to go back and forth between the more visual and marketing types of things to the more reasoned user experience design problems.
It’s a diverse and multi-skilled team of people (and various dogs) split between Wellington and Dunedin. The team and board remain dedicated to environmental issues and philanthropy.
For the marketing site, the team came up with a character – Pam the Plumber – to represent the employer/small business owner suffering the pitfalls of DIY payroll..
Design for a page explaining the different ways the company does philanthropy
Making pricing, with a bunch of variables creating complexity, work on large and small screens
Design mockups for our employee app. The goal was to present pay info simply and clearly, but give these infos some vitality, and in doing so, make employees feel a bit more invested in their earnings and leave balances, and hopefully also encourage them and their employers to get involved in payroll giving.
The main of screens of the payroll app
Tiled image for promoting the app on the App Store
Sometimes we make these simple infographic-style business figures for things like reporting and marketing. It’s worth even doing this for the team, to celebrate the wins and milestones.
An invitation for a team tree-planting day in Wellington. I think invitations should always look tight – they should set expectations and encourage as many as possible to come along.
A couple of ads in Capital magazine in Wellington – for their suffrage issue (top) and their green issue. These types of things are sweet – having the opportunity to come up with something new, for a campaign or message or event.
We don’t print much at Thankyou Payroll – nice that we don’t really need to – this one though is a DL-sized printed flyer
An idea for employers – a fridge magnet calendar of public holidays
Most of the philanthropy is done by the Thankyou Charitable Trust, which has these lovely potluck dinners in community halls where charity grant recipients come along and korero.
Vector drawings of Pam the Plumber and her minions, and sketches below
Pam chilling for something we sent out in summer
Sometimes we’d use upbeat graphical holiday or month calendars to flag upcoming actions for employers
An idea for making cool typographic designs from a team values exercise
A cute illustration for a social media post – Year of the Pig
Another social media thing
Events are great for design work – fun and rewarding. You get to help define how things can feel, and create some ideas and set some expectations for people.
Here are some things ranging from the quick and easy and fun (a few hours of work) to big, full-on events (where you have to do a lot of cramming and be resourceful).
More recently I’ve really enjoyed making gig posters for Die Musikband!
We set up the 2015 Dunedin Fringe Festival with a new look, a new site with a CMS, and used the API ticketing website Eventfinder for smooth ticket buying and content management for staff and artists. The system enabled the Fringe team of staff volunteers to keep re-skinning the site each year with their new look, making it awesomely sustainable and great value for money.
This was a cool new event (2015), and a nice blank canvas. It needed something fresh done on a small budget. The design was about cool fonts and nice typography, and creating something that felt contemporary, and distinct from other writers’ festivals.
Back in 2011 I helped Peter Cole and the lovely and hardworking festival committee on a whole bunch of design formats to promote the inaugural Port Chalmers Seafood Festival. To ensure the event was super-visible we made tons of collateral. The event kicked off when the Rugby World Cup was in town, it was Spring, the weather was sweet, and the whole thing was a heartening success for Port and Dunedin. I helped out again with the 2013 festival.
Album art for Die (‘Dee’) Musikband. We are an instrumentals band who love jamming and playing immersive, dancey gigs.
Making gig posters is the best! This one is pencil and ink. If you want these things to work well as Facebook event images, you have to change the design so it works in landscape format, which is a bit like trying to get your head around your website design working on desktop versus mobile.
Logos are usually clean, highly refined picture-marks. Or they can be elegant, simple typemarks – something distinctive, just made of text. Sometimes more flexible approaches are good, like arrangements of colour and texture and icons or illustrations that help comprise a visual brand.
It's not everything, but it is still really useful to have some kind of decent emblem to help shape ideas, expectations and an organisation's design values and strategy.
I love going back to the roots and working in dark pencils and black ink, paint and colour pencils. It's a different way of working and thinking, even if you often end up layering and changing drawn things on the computer.
Hand-drawing is still the best thing for generating ideas, compositions, shapes and identity stuff. Sometimes also for type, structure and navigation, diagrams. It's because you're forced to iterate, and you're not as distracted by all the things on the computer and the seductive precision of perfect shapes and flat colours which can make things seem better than they are.
Sometimes people want a more loose hand-drawn look for the actual outcome too, which is awesome.
Blast off! Pencil on pizza box
There are a bunch of these hand-drawn beer labels on another page
A set of icons representing school values for Balmacewen Intermediate
From a set of icons representing school values for Balmacewen Intermediate
From a set of icons representing school values for Balmacewen Intermediate
A cheeky wee illustration for this city council document
A diagram about ABA therapy for Emily Ware and the Otago Kid’s Autism website
Another version (2017) of the ‘Christmas ghost’ for thank-you cards for the Otago Children's Autism Support Group.
A couple of designs for Christmas thank-you cards for the Otago Children's Autism Support Group for recent years.
A wee group of icons for the Vision Port Chalmers group, like for use as a kind of masthead on their website
A layered diagram about natural hazards for the City Council
Gig poster for a Tom Waits covers night
T shirt graphic for the Sunley Band
A sheep on a cross for a now-lapsed café
Part of a little dreamy thing I did called Nor'west Zephyr for DUD Comics
Exhibition poster for a 2nd-year drawing course I used to run at uni
Some icons for Fair Trade Dunedin's cafe guide
A spontaneous bad-dreamdoodle in the living room
A few of the illustrations from Justice and Jellybeans by the late Ron Chambers, the irrepressible ex-proctor of Otago University
Figures for an infographic about City Council assets and spending
A Dog's Life: for an exhibition ages ago
A tattoo design for a couple of friends
Where the Mild Things Are ... a cheeky little thing about technology for in Mazagran
Some home-made calendar pages, with help from one of my kids. Fun to make up a theme, also I like these more than store-bought ones cos of uncoated paper (better for writing on), and you can make your cell size for each day as large or small as you like, so you've better space to write down events.
Easy Way Up. A doodle
A-doodlin'
A cartoon about alternative ideas for Movember, the month of questionable moustaches
Gig poster for a fun but dodgy covers performance
Seems I wasn't very conservation-minded in 1978!
It's the use of path and point-defined shapes to make stuff that is flat and sharp and beautifully easy to scale and re-colour and so on. Fastidious but fun.
I worked with kids at the local primary school to create these illustrated flags for their four school houses: Belford, Dunrobin, Larnach, and Mathieson. The designs are meant to have a bit of a fantasy kinda Harry Potter kind of vibe. So that they are engaging for younguns, and so that they can represent some aspects of the local suburb, environment, history, city and region. We're planning to make large-format hand-stitched ones.
A diagram to explain the different goals of ABA therapy
Slide for investment pitch for my friends at Thankyou Payroll
Some ideas for a process document for Boost New Media
An invitation for a kid's party
The design for the Pōhā o te Titi app and accompanying docs involved many shapes made using Illustrator
Deep breath cards for my boy with autism. Random numbers on the back, which were shown as a reward upon the drawing of a deep breath
The Hippocratic Oafs: a rock band made up of wayward medical students
Michael Joseph Savage (first labour Prime Minister of NZ) t-shirt design
Figures for kids promotional events for the local council when the FIFA U-20 Football World Cup was in town
Product drawings for a locally-made drying rack
A tongue-in-cheek gang patch for an Irish feminist comedy duo
Backpod product detail
A figure for a friend's wedding: he's local, she's English
A detail I liked from a poster I made years ago
I wanted to put up some of this miscellaneous print-based stuff I’ve enjoyed working on: ads, covers and documents, book design and typesetting, presentations and exhibitions.
Huia wine ad for Morven from Tradecraft
Kai Korero was an informal mahinga kai and science journal, part of a nationwide project based out of University of Otago under Henrik Moller.
These are part of a big series of big A0 wall panels for the southern branch of the Labour Party’s centenary celebration.
This one is a stylised diagram for local engineers Fluent. They wanted something suggesting their various kinds of work, that works like an emblem or illustration.
Book design and typesetting for historian and archivist Yvonne Wilkie. We loved the choice of this for the cover image: a float of Jesus Christ being pulled through the streets of South Dunedin.
Book design and typesetting for What’s Cooking Otago.
Some documents and journal design for a couple of conservation and science projects partly based at University of Otago: Te Tiaki Mahinga Kai, and the Titi Project, both under Henrik Moller. It was doing typesetting for the Titi Times that helped me get a start going freelance.
Book design, typesetting and illustration for the late Ron Chambers, ex-proctor of the university. Epic yarns and laconic prose, skilfully edited by Paul Sorrell.
Design of large panels for one of Stevenson Design’s successful forays in the ADNZ awards.
Toitu, also known as Otago Settlers Museum, needed to create a new map. The idea was to stylise the plan view and create fun and collection-specific icons to help visitors better navigate the museum. Scale and distance are distorted – the important factors are making things recognisable and simplifying the directional relationships between things.
This kind of process starts with sketching, a much faster and more fluid way of iteration than using the computer.
The icons are also used in other resources for school kids and other visitors.
Alex and Morven McAuley of Tradecraft came up with a sort of 1960s Italian-modernism style figure to use with various collateral for the 30th birthday of Prego, a busy and delicious restaurant in Ponsonby, specialising in traditional Italian food.
Lush photos by Bonny Stewart-MacDonald.
MeenyMo is a place where you can freely make decisions for the dilemmas of everyday life. It's designed to help purchases (or even little ones), dating options, bets, choosing services, holiday destinations, or even boring work stuff. MeenyMo is a more accessible version of the award-winning 1000Minds online decision-making tool.
Alex worked with the team to come up with punchy, usable, responsive design and copy that helped walk users through the main steps and not be overwhelmed by either imagery or the inherent complexity of the product. The key elements of typography, layout and navigation needed to work well on large and small screens to reassure new users and help them concentrate on the way they phrase their own decision-making steps.
Here is a grab-bag of some websites from recent times, that aren’t shown elsewhere on this site.
We’ve stopped doing custom-built sites as Julian and I have moved on to other busy jobs. I’m still creating Squarespace and Shopify sites for people – they are nice and efficient and direct processes, and they usually offer all the functionality needed by small businesses. The themes are nice and flexible, they work well on small screens, and they promote nice web typography.
Wordpress site for Vodafone Foundation who do good in philanthropy and social investment. There are a bunch of page templates, some tricksy bilingual forms, and flexible menus that can cope with many content changes.
Here’s another plug for MeenyMo, the awesomely usable mini-(and free) version of 1000Minds.
Nice clean Squarespace gallery site for Victoria McIntosh’s beautiful and provocative art objects and jewels.
An elegant simple portfolio site for award-winning architectural designers Stevenson Design
The NZ Youth Accord, supported by the Vodafone Foundation, is about getting people and organisations motivated to help reduce the number of disadvantaged young people in Aotearoa. This bold and clear manifesto and form was made with Squarespace.
Wordpress site for the Tapestry Trust of NZ. Their cool and lovely slow-burning project is creating large stitched narrative history panels, created by many hundreds of people around the country. I was lucky enough to help with the time-consuming process of designing some of the panels too.
A nice little Wordpress site for historian and Bluffie Mike Stevens, and some cool imagery to help the accompanying Facebook group to involve a wider network of people to read and contribute to the stories.
This charitable trust, the Otago Children’s Autism Support Group, has done great job of organising and funding therapy for kids with autism in Dunedin and Otago for many years. I’m a sometimes helper, mostly just doing design and content for the website, some other occasional design or illustration, and helping with the Facebook. Huge thanks go to those parents who are the ones who do all the patient and regular work with the meetings, funding applications and finances and events.
For a fundraising concert which had to be postponed because of the restrictions. The main image is black ink colourised on the computer.
A diagram to explain the different goals of ABA therapy
A couple of illustrations for thank-you cards at Xmas.
The website (on Squarespace) is a pretty compact little place for parents and people from education/healthcare to see what the group and ABA therapy are about.
There was a bunch of design for this successful fundraising event
A glimpse at a strategy doc for the design and fundraising
All the small and (not-so)-fast things, that are worth doing well. Fun!
Labels, brochures, business stationery types-o-things, greeting or special cards or invitations, music covers, and all kinds of nice small tangible things.
Print became a whole lot easier, cheaper, faster, and more homogenous. But within that, the cheapest and fastest isn’t usually the best course, if you want quality things that last longer and work better.
I haven’t done a load of signs, but I like them. Good signage is where graphic design meets architecture.
The hand-painted ones are a bit different. Confession: I want to get old and live off doing hand-painted signs.
A sandwich board for the ski shop, and one for a school fundraiser.
A couple for the Haunted House at the school fair. I enjoyed being a zombie and making kids scream in the dark
Daz’s van. Darren makes really sweet furniture and wood stuff.
Papa Chou’s restaurant in lower Stuart St. Signs made by Street Concepts in Oamaru. Thanks Lance.
Stevenson Design were into some good durable stainless letters, and a cool cropped number on their wedge on Forbury Rd by the sea.
I drew this for Zanzibar and it became a lightbox on the street
We were commissioned to design and build an app for the 'birding' community, who do traditional harvesting of titi (also known as muttonbirds or shearwaters). The emphasis on the app was ease of use, education, and enabling good data recording and presentation to aid in planning and sustainability.
The birders needed to be able to to use the app on far south offshore islands, away from any cellphone towers, so we couldn't use the internet for updates or recording, so we had to opt for a Windows desktop app instead of mobile website or smartphone app.
The design needed to feel warm and engaging for kids, who could encourage and teach some of their whanau to use it. Data presentation, tide and moon data, animation, and other tricky parts of the app worked really well, thanks to the programming wizardry of Julian Moller (Massive Media). Thanks also to Corey Bragg for patient and kind project management.
Drawings, diagrams and things that have helped to teach some everyday concepts to my boy on the autism spectrum. These are personal resources which overlap really well with doing design and content for regular audiences.
‘Social stories’, used by some therapists and educators, are about trying to explain rules and situations in a way that helps you to understand different factors and perspectives. So it’s not just knowing a rule, having it told to you, it’s about understanding it better, and hopefully learning empathy for others. We are more likely to follow rules and guidelines when they are gently explained, and when we understand the reasons for them.
Social stories don’t have to be drawn like comics, they could look like anything. We should probably assume though that design and presentation, and the degree to which things seem ‘official’ or ‘professional’, does probably help better compel both neurotypical and neurodivergent people. Or, put another way, the time you put into something will probably help it work better, for any audience.
If that seems like hard work, well yes, good point! These are ‘sometimes’ things – when there is a problem, and you realise you have to invest some time to try to solve it. But most of the time, the tricky and strange situations are better understood after conversations, writing plans and rules down on paper, that sort of thing.
Trying to make a black-and-white idea about carrying cash (coins OR notes) into a more flexible approach. One part of the problem was a wallet heavy with all the coins. It’s more difficult to make and understand rules that are vague about amounts, times etc.
Things with more of an ‘if this, then that’ kind of flow might lend themselves to more of an algorithmic-style diagram.
These deep breath cards were designed to be a non-verbal prompt to calm down. Verbal commands and prompts have some problems, like tone of voice and volume, and feelings of sudden-ness, and other things that result in longer processing time. A wee trick with these was to have random numbers on the back of each card. The reward for the deep breath was to turn the card over and enjoy seeing a favourite thing – a number.
These ‘conversation cards’ had a set of explanations for different contexts: for family, friends, strangers, and for oneself. It’s pretty audacious to go up to someone and give them a card explaining how your brain works, but at the very least, these are good to read and work on self-awareness.
This was an early one for the school team. Some of the key concepts are: breaking up work and tasks, using visual prompts, using breaks and rewards. The emphasis is still on achievement and being positive.
Brushing teeth properly takes time! Many steps and tricky motor skills.
