Woodblock Forest

This was my approach to original brief for the IPEX pitch with Direct Design in 2008. I was picturing IPEX as being a world of print in itself - a place for the movers and shakers in the industry to meet and communicate, so I let my imagination run wild and created these illustrations of different places within the world of print.

There's 'Woodblock Forest' - the illustration depicts a clearing within the forest where print cartridges are refilling from a rainbow stream.

'Litho plains' is a pretty, friendly scene; wide-format printers graze next to pens of smaller inkjet herds amongst newspaper tree against a backdrop of CMYK mountain.

'Wide format superhighway' is a deliberately less cartoony illustration - while still bright and colourful, it removes the cutes characters. This was essentially to show that the campaign could still be restrained and balanced if necessary.

The 'World of Print' key visual wraps the entire concept into a globe motif that carries the illustration style and would be used either stand alone or as a secondary 'logo' on other printed work for the campaign.

I think the potential this had as a concept for a print exibition was enormous, and was presented to IPEX at the pitching stage along with the other campaign ideas from Direct Design. Our creativity and breadth of ideas won us the job and we continued to develop our ideas and explore other concepts to distill it into the final campaign for IPEX2010, so although these illustrations never made it to the exhibition, the ideas and thinking behind them helped to shape the campaign and move it forward.