Here’s a selection of the samples I received from Tokyo in the last few weeks. I am especially pleased with the wooden products. The silkscreening and the color finish are impeccable. I also enjoyed how the designers combined my animals to create new patterns like the fish and the octopus. Shown: blackboards and mini photo albums by You Power, Japan.
Sorry to have been inactive this long. I have been working on restructuring my website and reworking my designs into viable collections available for licensing. Here’s an ad that will be running in the next Total Art Licensing magazine. You can see a few samples of new patterns and designs on the left that I will present on this blog soon. The website, well, will be ready once my collections are in order!
This ladybug family was honored this week with an award of excellence from the Society of News Design’s 30th annual competition, one of 32 awards garnered by La Presse, placing this French language broadsheet in fifth place in the world, behind respected papers such as the New York Times.
La Presse is one of Montreal’s four dailies – you read right, FOUR dailies in this city – 3 published in French and one in English. You can see all 32 of the winning projects, including four more of mine, in Saturday’s edition (February 21st). To see all the 971 awards (out of over 10,000 entries from 42 countries) you’ll have to wait until the book comes out this Fall.
Ritzenhoff did a great job with my coffee cup design for their My Darling 2008 collection. This sunny lion is king of the Java Jungle in the morning with his brew. Notice how the cup and the packaging are related to form a complete character that looks really good in the store display. The challenge is not only to make the cup interesting on all sides but also to create a character that a coffee lover can relate to.
A bit of background
The design started out as a business card for a very small corner café (now closed unfortunately). The owner, Remo, is a Leo. I developed a number of lions in different café settings and this one was Remo’s favorite. It also became the poster for my first exhibition of animal art at the café called «Les rois animaux» (The Animal Kings). Later on I submitted a revised and adapted version to Ritzenhoff but I didn’t hear from them for quite awhile, and then, surprise, one morning they announced their intention to produce the cup for this season.
