Ceredigion CIS: Creative collaborations | Stuff and Nonsense

Having had fantastic feedback from our work for Flintshire Youth, when I was asked to design for another CIS project, this time for Ceredigion Council, I chose again to work with the wonderfully talented illustrator Holly Lloyd

My self-set creative challenge was to create a design that was different in graphic design and illustrative style from any of my previous CIS projects.

Lloyd and I decided to base our design around a sixties music and fashion theme (two of my passions). This theme might not be the first that springs to mind in relation to young people in the early noughties, but Lloyd's cheeky characters and her youthful drawing style made it suit the new site perfectly.

We started by photographing some of the distinctive buildings and landscapes around Aberaeron, a beautiful small town on the west Wales coast, well known for its colourfully painted buildings. We knew that these buildings would provide a wonderful foundation for the site design.

Working from the source photographs, Lloyd created a series of stylised backgrounds, first as black-and-white, hand-drawn line-art, then electronically coloured.

This gave us the flexibility of making each of the backgrounds into either a day or night scene.

I kept my graphic and layout design for this site intentionally simple to allow Lloyd's illustrations to take center stage alongside the content. Layouts began life as a series of rough paper sketches (all now sadly lost in a studio move), before being converted into wireframe layouts.

Ceredigion CIS's final design, technically accomplished using a combination of hand-drawn illustration, style-sheets and even a sprinking of Flash, is one that I am immensely proud of. It succeeds in being very different from many run-of-the-mill local council initiative sites.