My scribbles have kept me busy. I’ve been working on a few projects since my last post here.  Most of them cannot be shared here out of discretion. This one however, can be.

I was approached by the organiser of a local charity setting up an office where people looking for financial guidance, help figuring out the maze of forms for employment and disability benefits and all sorts of similar advice could come in and get help for free.

They needed a simple, eye catching logo that would in future be instantly recognisable as a place where help could be obtained. The logo had to contain the name of this office: Dunfermline Advice Hub.

These were my initial ideas:

The colours I chose because they Promote inspiration, imagination, empathy, self respect, intuition, clarity and confidence.
After some feedback and tweaking, this was the final design. Simple, efficient and striking:

The feedback I have had is that people are noticing the Dunfermline Advice Hub on the local high street as the colours stand out from all the other shop signs. This is exactly what I had hoped would be the case.

What is The Dunfermline Advice Hub?

If you like your Monty Python, you will get the title.

 

Anyway,  on to business. Of sorts.

Some time back I was approached by a gentleman who is building his own scale airport. He wanted a resident airline to inhabit that airport. That airline is called Air Republica. And boy, does he not skimp on the detail.

He had an old livery that he drew up in 2002 using a wing design he’d penned as a youngster. He wanted to keep the wing, but modernise it. He also wanted me to keep the silver painted fuselage, but modernise the overall livery on top of it.

I know what you are thinking; “it’s a toy airline, so what?”
Well, it may not be a real, flying, airline. But this guy runs a very successful business and treated this like any real world project. This was no easy project. He threw in curve balls, spanners and wrenches into the project like any other client I have worked with.
If anything, this was good practice to keep my creative juices flowing!
He even went as far as to copyright all the work, once completed!

So, on to the project

First off, we needed a revamped logo. We started off on a completely stylised tangent. But gradually, the client wanted it to look more and more like the original, until… well, see for yourself. I think the logo is a good compromise between modernising the wing, but also keeps firm hold of its roots.

 

Once the logo was finalised, on to the livery.

Designing a livery for such a small scale (1:500) presented interesting challenges. I had to be mindful that not all the details would translate very well or would effectively become lost due to the small canvas.
Subtle detailing was off the cards altogether!  Elements had to be bold, brash and obvious.

As it happens, I hit bullseye with the very first design!  The client loved it. Aside from a few small tweaks to where the registry, flag, aircraft model number goes, the below illustration is more or less exactly as I first presented it.  We also completed the cargo version of the livery at the same time. Yes, this semi-imaginary airline has cargo ops too!

 

After that, it was on to drawing up a “Paint plan” for a large multinational die-cast model maker so they know how to apply the artwork to 777-300ER and 772LRF models.

 

At the same time, I design the box art for the box the models would be delivered in:

 

 

The models came out sweet!

 

Air Republica, Big Monkey Cargo and the Air Republica Gold Wing are registered trademarks of Air Republica Group.  © Air Republica Group 2013 – All Rights Reserved.

I liked this project. The 146 is one of my favourite planes.  I just like its proportions and style.  Britain’s last independent hurrah in the commercial aviation world. Killed off by men in suits who were only interested in as much money in return for their time as possible.

Anyway…  I was contacted by Meteor Aero Services to provide a simple livery, mainly white for their BAe146 which they would be outfitting in an executive configuration for business charters and the like.

The brief was simple:

“Keep it simple and clean. There needs to be room up front for ad-hoc decal titles. Oh, and make it smile.”

– Can do!

So Boeing announced the launch of the 787-10 with an order from BA and UA.  So much for all the nay sayers that said neither airline would order from Boeing again after the troubles they had with the 787-8!

Here’s what a BA 787-10 might look like:

There was talk on the Airliners.net forum that Air China could do with a fresh look.  I quickly drew this up using a logo that I had worked on, but abandoned some time ago.

I think if I revisit this, I’ll change the colours and styling a little. For now, it’s a “make do” design.

Someone asked me to come up with a livery of the future for Lufthansa. It had to be clean, professional but modern.  This is what I came up with:

 

With Swiss going the way of Finnair with a minimal, billboard library, I thought I’d have a bash at a slightly less minimalist, yet conservative livery and logo.

Change perhaps?   I doubt it.   But I wanted to see if I could come up with something different to their current mismatch of a livery.

 

XH558 is the only airworthy Vulcan Bomber left in the world. She needs lots of money to keep flying.  If every enthusiast would just donate £1 or £2, XH558 need not die.

 

Keep her flying!

It seems that Boeing are trying to pull off a record for the most amount of special liveries introduced with the launch of a new aircraft.

ANA, United and now China Southern have introduced special liveries for their 787s. It’s also likely China Southern will be using their special livery on almost all their 787s.

With this in mind, I quickly doodled up these: