This Is Not Art 2008

Small Studio has won the pitch for This Is Not Art 2008. We're very excited, and although we can't show you the winning concepts (yet), we can show you one that didn't make it.

Dandelion Wine CD

Dandelion Wine, an ethereal post-dreampop band from Melbourne approached Small Studio to create the artwork for their latest Album, Selected Anachronisms. the artwork consists of a digipack case and 16 page booklet, Taking inspiration from the album's title, the lyrics dark themes the bands interest in symmetry, geometrical concepts and astronomical/astrological themes.

Scruffy Bunch Tours Brochure

Scruffy Bunch tours approached Small Studio to design a brochure for their Yarra Valley winery and microbrewery tours. Their brief was to capture the youth market, and express the tour's no-nonsense, down to earth and light hearted approach. Small Studio employed clean layouts and whimsical illustrations to this effect, resulting in a great design that stands out from the usual crop in the hotel brochure stand.

Advanced Publishing Systems Website

Small Studio recently completed the design and development for Advanced Publishing Systems new website.

The whole site was developed in Silverstripe, an off the shelf, super user friendly CMS — We were surprised to discover the client updating the site before we'd even conducted the training session!

Check out the site here.

Covers Stars

One of our friendly clients, Blackwell Publishing, often commissions Small Studio to produce covers for the stable of industry journals it publishes. These are an interesting opportunity to flex our creative print muscle in an area often neglected by designers (journals you see, don't fight for shelf space like their glamorous cousins in periodicity, magazines, often missing out on the dressing up they deserve). Today we'll take a look at the development process behind our most recent cover for the Australian Accounting Review, showing some failed prototypes, the path to the final design, and how we made accounting look exciting.

Initial concepts, playing with bold compositions, swiss type and the CPA colour scheme:

Heading in the right direction:

Going back to the publication's original colours:

Cook for 45 minutes on medium, remove from oven, deliver to client:

And just because Small Studio loves you, here's a peek at 2 other recent cover designs:

OceanaGold Website

By far the largest project undertaken by Small Studio thus far, we tackled the task of building a website for an international corporation (Complete with a Content Management System, Live stock market updates and Rich Media integration) with gusto, vigour and more than the odd late night staring blearily at the computer screen.

Visit OceanaGold here.

Mia Munro ID

Small recently completed a corporate ID and web design project for Queensland based corporate events speaker Mia Munro.