This year's Ortús Chamber Music Festival has just come to a close! 6 years on, and this team continue to be an absolute delight to work with, and always put on an incredible show!

Last little bit of Tetris nonsense for now, just because I think Tetrominos are quite pretty?

So, it turns out there's a WikiHow about making Ds games...

If in doubt, Tetris is always a good idea.

It's my birthday next week, and with that, I'll be celebrating 9(!) years of OneCuriousChip! So here's a little advert I designed for myself and what I do: graphic design and illustration, or dearadh grafach agus léaráid, as Gaeilge. Click through to see the design process behind this one. :)

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; a digital painting to accompany the little biography section in my Study in Scarlet project.

Sometimes I draw tiny things. This was one of them. Another illustrated element fro my Study in Scarlet project!

One of the most interesting - and most time-consuming! - parts of my Study in Scarlet project was the typography in all the adverts. Everything is based very heavily on historical advertising references from the early 1900s (I had a lot of fun with that research!) and I ended up drawing pretty much every letter by hand. There are so many delightful quirks in that vintage lettering, and I really wanted to capture as many of those characterful details as possible! Click through to take a look!

I didn’t know much about the SS Sirius until recently, despite seeing its legacy all over Cork. If you visit Cobh today, you might pass the Sirius Arts Centre; if you wander around Passage West you might see a paddle shaft from the ship on display; it's even the reason Ballycotton has a lighthouse now!

I'll share its story below if you're curious, but the reason I researched and drew it in the first place was as part of an advert in my Scarlet project. I've used artistic license obviously, but it's a self-indulgent project anyway, so I drew my favourite instead of a more accurate ship 🤷 It felt like a good time to share the story too, as Sirius made its most famous journey in April. I’ve also been playing AC Black Flag lately, humming sea shanties while sailing around in my virtual ship. So, here's the (shortened!) story of a historic Cork ship!

A while back, I started listening to Sherlock Holmes stories while I worked. One idea led to another, and soon enough, I found myself researching early 1900s typography, advertising and newspapers, so that I could redesign the first Sherlock Holmes story, "A Study in Scarlet," as an issue of The Illustrated Police News, full of illustrations and advertisements that support the story. For many reasons, this is perhaps the most self-indulgent personal project I've taken on lately, and one of my favourite portfolio pieces to date. ️️

I plan to talk about some of the individual elements later on - this project gave me an excuse to draw steam ships and violins and portraits and hats! - but for now I just want to share the project as a whole. A fun little adventure through history and storytelling via graphic design. ️

I’ve been interested in Ui and Ux design for a while now. I took a couple online courses a few years back, and every now and then I play around with the various app ideas knocking around my head. Yoga Flow is one of them.

When I started practicing Yoga a few years back, I wanted an app like this and couldn’t find one. I just wanted a library of yoga positions, so I could select the ones I wanted and semi-automatically create a routine that would flow together reasonably well. I have a bunch of features in mind that I’d love in an app like this, and I had a lot of fun designing it. It was mostly an excuse to explore Ui and Ux design, though I genuinely would like this app to exist. Is there one out there that comes close? (Or is there a coder out there who would like to make one with me? XD )

In January 2018, I got a new job as a book cover and general graphic designer with Mercier Press, a publisher based in Cork. I have always loved reading and books and design and art and typography, so this job has been a wonderful experience so far. For over a year now, I have loved exploring ideas and capturing stories through images and words, and I love pushing my skills a little bit further with every new project that comes my way. So today, I wanted to celebrate some of that work, by gathering some of my favourite covers from 2018. Keep an eye out for them in bookshops!

Recently, I was asked to design a logo for a local DJ group called LoopTown. Dealing mostly with late teen audiences and house music, I had some fun playing around with styles and symbols that I thought would resonate with that audience. I wanted to create something fresh and distinctive for the group, mixing between simplicity and complexity to create an image they could build a brand on. 

Earlier this year, I was invited to join a project that got me excited immediately. The Guards, an independent comic with a brilliant creative team behind it, is finally ready for the release! Act 1 will be launched at Dublin Comic Con this year, and I promise you it's worth picking up a copy! Written by Shane Ormond, with art by Kevin Keane, and working with editor, Colin O'Mahoney; I was delighted to provide comic lettering and design for the book. I think the team did an incredible job, and I am so proud and delighted to have been a part of it. 

I had so much fun with this one! None Shall Pass, created by John Murphy of Bold Puppy and pushed a step further with LS Comics, was of those projects that really makes me fall in love with graphic design all over again. A great team of talented people came together to work on this teaser-version of the book, and I was utterly delighted to have been a part of it. Many thanks to Eoin of LSComics, John of Bold Puppy, Robert Carey, Dee Cunniffe, and Cormac Hughes! 

Click to play! This project has been a long time coming (you can read about Update 01 and Update 02, if you like), but I'm finally sharing the final render. It was something of an experiment, which meant it came and went with a whole bunch of challenges, but I did have a lot of fun with it! 

One of our assignments in college this semester is to create a 30-second advert for a product of our choice. I picked Zippo lighters; mostly because the product itself is pretty cool, so I found it easy to come up with an strong, visually dynamic idea which would sum up the product well. I'm having a lot of fun with it, and it's starting to come together now, so I figured I might as well start sharing the process involved in it as I make progress. Here's step one: The Pitch! ...Which, in this case, also includes styleframes and the storyboard.