40watt: Pretty nice designs

Branding

Is your brand in need of a makeover? I can create a look and logo that’s stylish, versatile and ‘you’.

I can also create brochures, business cards, newsletters, print advertisements and other material for your existing brand. I specialise in content that’s punchy, precise and jargon-free.

Randall & Associates

Logo, business card and letterhead designs

Randall & Associates logo

Engineering is a well-established profession, so this New Zealand firm wanted an identity that was innovative but still presented that stable dependable foundation. The zen sand-garden motif came about in a happy accident, and we felt it just the right metaphor for their brand identity.

Randall & Associates letterhead concept 1 Randall & Associates business card Randall & Associates letterhead concept 2

GSD-Sonet

Logo design and brochures

GSD-Sonet logo

GSD-Sonet is a Flash-based system for remote-controlling a building’s infrastructure: heating, power, security systems and so on. GSD-Sonet is slick, modern and elegant — unlike its prehistoric competitors — and sports a logo to match.

GSD-Sonet brochure front GSD-Sonet brochure back

To market the software, we created 4-page brochures in Finnish and English; I was responsible for the English localisation. Download the English PDF brochure here.

Further reading

Morrgan’s Creatures

Logo design and store promotions

Morrgan’s Creatures store banner
Christmas-Freddy promotion Easter-Freddy promotion Holiday-Freddy promotion

Meet Frederick Raven. Freddy likes coffee, birdseed, opera and long walks on the beach. He’s one of the many little creatures my wife has knitted, and was tickled pink (well, purple) when we chose him as the mascot for her business.

Datawest Limited

Logo design

Datawest Logo

The logo for this New Zealand hosting service had an oddly difficult birth, going through two dozen different concepts before arriving at this one. Some of the alternative concepts are shown below.

Some time after the design was accepted, a friend remarked to me that it was the saddest spider he had ever seen. Why does this keep happening to me?

Datawest water-drop logo concept Datawest orchard logo concept Datawest pea-pod logo concept
Datawest comet logo concept

Reudink HRM

Logo design

Reudink logo

An act of guerilla branding. This Dutch HR firm was not my client, but that of a designer friend; I mocked up this logo entirely on a whim, and later found out he had shown it to the client on my behalf and they had accepted it. Which was nice.

I felt the brand demanded this bold woodcut treatment, like a Soviet propaganda poster. Alas, the client went with a tamer treatment.

Livingstone Business Equipment

Logo design and stationery

Livingstones letterhead
Livingstones business card

After a change of ownership, this New Zealand firm decided they needed a sharper image. I created a new look for them, and designed stationery and a variety of signage for their premises.

Shortly afterwards, a friend observed that the logo looks like a giant nose sniffing their name and now I can’t un-see it.

The Good Ship St. Marianne

Steam-powered dirigible

The Good Ship St. Marianne

A character design for the website of a friend: serializing the sartorial exploits of a dapper pirate-adventurer and his airship. While we both loved the balls-out art deco, we eventually decided this was just a little too heavy-handed for a blog about ties.

DINZ meal packaging

Packaging design

DINZ meal packaging 1 DINZ meal packaging 2

Lid designs for the packaging of DINZ, a range of prepared gourmet meals for hotels and motels.

Eponym Audio

Logo design and business card

Eponym Audio business card

Designed for a composer friend who makes music for computer games. I aimed for something that evoked digital but which implied a wider repertoire than the likes of DJ Q-Tip’s Ultimate Ibiza Anthems.

Psychotic Motorsport

Logo design

Psychotic Motorsport Logo

A logo with snazz in mind, designed for a motorsport-journalism and apparel label.

GIAC Internet Consultancy

Foldout brochure

GIAC brochure cover GIAC brochure interior

My first commercial print project back in 2000 was this glossy promotional brochure for a web consultancy firm. The company went under soon afterward, hopefully not as a result of the printing costs.

I think it’s one of my most successful designs, but the content is unbelievably cheesy: an unintentional parody of pre-slump ecommerce naïveté. I don’t write this badly anymore, honest.