The logo was a mix of a few initial designs, produced by myself and Mick Backhouse, a senior designer at ripe. We wanted to show the amazing form of the building, together with the shroud that covers parts of the building. Also, as the hotel spans the actual racetrack, we wanted to show how the hotel reaches across the track, and how the track passes under the hotel. Shown here is the final 2d logo, derived from a 3d illustration created in 3ds Max. As the logo needed to be ‘built’ to be shown inside the hotel, I needed to supply cad files of how to build the logo, as the sweeping nature of the overlapping curves and shroud are quite complicated.

I’m still a very infrequent user of facebook, although I do understand the fascination of looking up old friends and school mates etc. I still frimly believe it’s one for people with too much time on their hands.

These camper vans are now built and on the road visiting universities and events across the country to promote the i-to-i travel offerings. Below is the design for the corporate camper van. This is the style that i-to-i decided to go with. Initially they wanted a few different stlyes of van, hence all the work, but in the end they liked the corporate one so much that they decided to just go with that.

The images above show how I designed the inside of the camper van with the rear seats turned around to create a meeting room / space inside the van. Additionally storage units were built into the base of the seating. The double side door also featured storage and display areas for promotional material and when both doors were opened, I designed a ‘roof’ section that spanned the doors to create some shelter when the van was being used with the doors opened all day.

Below is a graphic that shows the different accessories that would be used on the different kinds of camper vans, i.e the surfboard on the ’surf’ van and the suitcases on the safari van. I visited a Volkswagen camper van meet in Halifax and met with lots of people to gain an insight into the camper van world. I took lots of pictures for inspiration to help me with the designs for the different vans.

Initially the client’s idea was to photograph a significant amount of the imagery for the ads, but thankfully they also considered 3d modeling and rendering too. When I spoke with them, we discussed the possibility of creating all the actual ‘YOU’ text models in 3D and then photoshopping them into photographed scenes that would be shot traditionally. I felt this may work, but could end up being more work than actually creating everything in 3D. Also keeping everything 3D would allow flexibility if we needed to change things as the work progressed, something traditional photography wouldn’t allow !

I did some initial tests completely 3D designed, and these showed that we would get the results the client was looking for, so the decision was mad to go all 3D, nice.

This one was one of my favorites as it was quite tricky to set up. You can’t really see all the detail here, but there is lots in the edges of the sand around the letters. The YOU sandcastle was created by displacing a high poly mesh and then a number of high-resolution textures, bump and displacement maps were drawn in photoshop. Vray displacement mapping was used to create the subtle ‘crumbly’ edges to the 3D letters.

I thought it would be nice to show the clients sketches on this one to give you an idea of the kind of things I usually have to work with, these were good as at least I didn’t have to start from scratch on this one, and after a lengthy conversation with a couple of the guys over at Brandfuel, I had a good idea of how to move forwards with the design.

Side view of the stand, it was quite a big one this, 23m x 15m.

This 3d render (with the roof removed) shows how the 4 meeting rooms work and how the 2 studio setups sit nicely inside the space. The basic idea is that people can walk through this central section when crossing from the Pro products across to the consumer products area. It was designed to encourage people to see the Pro Studio equipment that will be displayed centrally. Additionally the meeting rooms can all see into the central area, so the people in them can watch the studio demonstrations that are taking place.

Side view of the stand, it was quite a big one this, 23m x 15m.

This is a more detailed 3d render of the interior of one of the meeting rooms.

I used illustrator to supply the required layered PDF, and designed myself a nice A4 sheet of custom cut, clear vinyl stickers, with white printed areas too, nice.

If you are in need of short run, custom stickers, it’s well worth paying Diginate a visit to see what they have to offer. My custom stickers are currently in the post, so fingers crossed they should be with me anytime soon… exciting indeed !

I must say, I did find the search talk to be very interesting. Search is touted to be the next bug thing as far as user interaction is concerned as a search has very targeted outcomes for the user, and is the most direct form of understanding the users needs. The concept of pages being built on the fly (using shadow pages to rank in google) is becoming more widespread, especially in the media and newspaper sectors. The whole idea of having the option to be directed to a targeted page, based on you as a user and specifically tour search data is very exciting. AKQU were also showing some interesting work at the conference, the work they did for Fiat ‘eco-drive’ and work they did recently with nike. It must nice to work with big budget clients !

Click the image to play the video.