Vote Dalek! The making of the Cover of the Century

I recently created a post about the making of this iconic Doctor Who cover & the fun that was had with the doctors evil enemies, the Daleks.

It lives here: https://www.ianmckinnell.com/behind-the-scenes#/cover-of-the-century/

The Economist

I rarely see what happens to my image library work so it was great to see this - a poster from the Economist's ad campaign with BBDO NY on a Boston station in the US

Digital Archaeology

Spent a lovely day here yesterday http://www.64bits.co.uk , wallowing in nostalgia. I took along my first (THE) first Macintosh from 1984 with a pile of disks & found lots of illustrations I'd forgotten about. Jim Boulton & a team from the British Library will try to get some of the images into a format that can be read on todays computers.

Here's an image that I managed to salvage earlier. It was a 2 bit (black or white) illustration, so to print in colour involved creating a series of separations for the repro house to wrangle into CMYK. Such low resolution presented great limitations; I really enjoyed working my way around them. Happy Days.

Vitsoe Chairs

These wonderful chairs were designed by the famous Dieter Rams. When Vitsoe.com finally obtained the license to remanufacture them they needed to show what the many colour combinations & modular design would look like. Before they had been made. Something I do a lot, photographing things that don’t exist.

The chairs were designed in the 1960’s so there were no computer models: I created new models using the original engineering blueprints. I'm gradually getting more & more into CAD

And the system's modular. You can make a sofa as long as you want.

Birthday

An old (!) friend & ex-assistant has a big birthday coming up. Here's her early present - the image for her invitation.

Radio Times Christmas Quiz 2016 | Creative retouching

There are 50 clues to the titles of some of the TV & Radio highlights from 2016 hidden here. How many can you solve?

The original file contains over 100 layers using images drawn from a wide variety of sources & some clues that are just er... drawn. How much retouching was involved? Well the background photograph of Rothenburg in Germany was taken in mid-summer...

Created with art director Jacob Howard: the picture quizzes were originated by Paul Smith. For more details see the Christmas issue of the Radio Times. There are prizes to be won!

Retouching: Radio Times Christmas Quiz

Here's one I created earlier. Only a few of the 90+ images here are mine, they come from a wide variety of sources. I apologise to all the image-makers involved: there are too many to credit, though the main background of York was shot by Martin Williams.

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Olympics Covers for the Radio Times

It's not in the shops yet, but as it's now on the Radio Times website I guess I can post it...This cover is one of those few issues where the executives get involved, so decisions can be convoluted & veer toward 'safe'.

You should have seen the ones that got away. 

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Flat Footballs

Experimenting with the Radio Times UEFA football cover. I love the silkscreen look of this

Radio Times Euro Football covers.

4 covers for the same issue - the Scottish cover with the balls (they don't have a team in the game) is an illustration but the 3 badges are almost straight photo's - the first I've taken for a long time. Getting all the studio gear out brought back a lot of memories. And dust!

My favourite unboxing video

It's good to see somebody enjoying my efforts - those are my images on all those boxes. Of course the geeks amongst you noticed straight away that this Indonesian version of the keyboard isn't available here. The UK/US version is the G410 that only comes in black. Sadly.

Letter from America

I just got an email from a very kind stranger in California. A Macintosh fan, he was clearing out his place & found a copy of the first MacWareHouse catalogue. He found my credit for the cover & asked if he could post it.  It's one of my favourite ancient illustrations too, originally created for a T Shirt for MacUser magazine.

That is so cool Steve Pruneau, I'm really touched!

Christmas Quiz 2015

It's that time of year again...there are 50 visual clues to popular TV programmes in this image from The (legendary) Radio Times Christmas issue . How many can you find? 

Cool

It's October & this new keyboard is launched. Sometimes it takes sooooo long: I made this image last December. It's difficult to keep up a blog when I can rarely tell anybody what I'm doing until months later.

This version is only available in Japan, where Logitech are called Logicool. I can't imagine why they don't use that name here...

we've all had these jobs!

Rugby World Cup

I seem to spend a lot of time fiddling with balls...

Postcards

The fancy lenticular postcards that I created with hiveassociates.co.uk started going out today. I've never promoted myself as an illustrator before so we're in uncharted territory here.

Want one? Send me your address. Your real on this earth address. 

Logitech G910

Logitech's latest all singing all dancing gaming keyboard. Each individual key lights up with any colour you can imagine. When you first plug it in there's an dazzling light show as waves of colour move over the keyboard, amazing visitors to the studio.

I created the images used on the packaging & promotion, made before the product entered production & there's always a lot of changes along the way. It's with trepidation that I opened the box when I was sent the real thing & I get to see if we got it right.

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Southern 50

This is what the river Chess looks like at dawn on Valentines day. 

Orienteering in the muddy landscape of the Chilterns. 50 kilometres took 12 hours, so we had to make a very early start. My poor feet! Everybody was staggering around like zombies that evening.

 

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Peak District

Hiking in the Derbyshire Hills. Incredible but very challenging conditions: 2 metres of snow in places, 20 degrees below zero with 60 mph winds on the summit.

We spent the following day abseiling down a old railway viaduct before driving home. Scary? Oh Yes!

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MacUser Magazine Covers

Sad news today. MacUser is to cease publication. The final issue made no mention of the fact, except for an image of the first issue without any caption or comment.

I was an associate editor of MacUser (both the UK & the US editions) for many years & photographed, illustrated (& even wrote) for many many issues. The UK offices were 5 minutes walk from the studio & I really enjoyed those trips to New York. I made many friends.

I had the pleasure of seeing the Macintosh evolve from its earliest days, exciting & revolutionary times.  I even met Steve Jobs a couple of times. He was horrid!

I originally created this cover for another magazine before MacUser started: MacUser upcycled it a year later. The Macintosh 128k in the photo was my own, one of the very first to arrive in the UK, long before it was released here. I used it to create the images for Apple's advertising campaign that launched the Mac in the UK. I've still got it. Model number M 00001. It even works.

A few years later we had a cat & I realised how inaccurate that image is. This was before Photoshop, this is a straight un-retouched photograph using studio flash and a long exposure to capture the screen.

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