To celebrate the Fiat 500's less than stellar showing in recent reliability and customer satisfaction surveys. Undoing all the good work done by the Panda and Bravo - shame on you Fiat!

MINI Crossman. Vile.

New Peugeot Logo

Hot on the heels of sister company Citroen, and just in time for its 200th anniversary, French carmaker Peugeot has revealed a "refreshed" corporate identity, featuring new typography and an updated rendering of the famed Lion. It's the first change since 1995, and easily the biggest change in the company's corporate identity since the 1970s. Previous updates of the logo design left the basic shape of the Lion pretty much untouched, and mainly involved the simple filling in of the Lion's outline.

I'm unconvinced by the new logo design, as, to me anyway, it no longer looks much like a Lion. The paws could come from a teddy bear, the legs and feet are too blocky, and there's a strange, disjointed looking hump at the back of the Lion's head, which I presume is meant to be representative of its mane. I also have some trouble with the chromed, 3D effect they've applied to it because the shading looks a little bit off. I'm just not sure why.

On the upside, the new typography is pretty sharp looking, and definitely more distinctive than the previous typeface, although the P and O in PEUGEOT are perhaps a little bit too stretched out for their own good.

For better or worse, the new logo and typography will be making their debut sometime this year on the production version of the Peugeot RCZ, a 308-derived small coupé designed to serve as a cut-price rival to the Audi TT and Volkswagen Scirocco.

Alfa Romeo Giulietta

Just look at it! Isn't it gorgeous? After the mild misstep that was the MiTo, Alfa's styling is definitely back on track with the stunning new Giulietta. Now, I know I just referred to the MiTo as something of a mild misstep in aesthetic terms, but that is no fault of Alfa Romeo's stylists. It's simply that the somewhat stubby proportions dictated by the MiTo's Fiat Punto-derived mechanical layout didn't sit particularly well with Alfa's traditionally swoopy, curvaceous styling.

The Giulietta employs the very same styling themes with far more success thanks to its more elongated proportions and lower stance, and reaffirms my belief that the Italians are the only people still capable of styling a car attractively while remaining within the restrictions imposed by current crash and pedestrian safety legislation. See the Fiat Bravo for further evidence, and compare both to the bluff fronted, oddly proportioned new models coming from the likes of Peugeot and Renault.

Some more random pisstakes/parodies.

Sorry Seat, but nothing you can do will ever be able to convince me that the Leon is anything more than a Volkswagen Golf with a slightly slicker looking body and a substantially cheaper interior.

Let the Leyland bashing continue forever more...

I'm afraid I don't buy into this Scrap & Save idea. I know they've been trying to sell it as an "environmental" measure, but everyone knows it's really to stop the UK's new car market from disappearing down the toilet. Unfortunately, it hasn't really benefited carmakers who actually produce cars within the UK or even Europe, as most of them somewhat stupidly jacked their prices up by around £2,000 to nullify any customer savings/profit losses likely to be made from the scrappage deal. Is a Focus 1.6 Zetec really worth over £17,000? Is a 1.4 litre Vauxhall Astra with barely enough power to pull you out of bed worth an RRP of £15,680? I don't think so!

The Italians, and particularly the Koreans had the good sense to leave their prices largely alone, and as such, with an additional £2,000 off, Fiat's sales are up, while Hyundai and Kia have been challenging Ford for the top spot in the UK market for the past 3 months.

Citroen keep referring to the C3 Picasso as the "Spacebox", so I thought I'd encourage potential owners to get "out of their box".

Twingo RenaultSport

Twishite & New Moan

The Bankers' Playground

These are the layout visuals for my Digital Media project, whereby we've to produce a 3 scene flash animation on a subject of our choice. The only stipulations that we have to strictly adhere to is the use of collage and the use of "hybrid creatures" in our animations.

I've decided to do something based around the credit crunch, depicting the causes, effects, and our esteemed governments' £700 billion solution to the problem. As you can see, these images already take the form of digital collage, and the flying pigs pretty much fit the dictionary definition of a hybrid creature.

The first image shows the land of plenty, depicting the bankers greed that caused the credit crunch, and also their seeming belief that money grow on trees, something which is about as likely as pigs flying.

The second image shows the effects of the credit crunch, here in the form of a ravaged cityscape in flames, liberally strewn with the RBS, HBOS and Northern Rock logos, while Sir Fred Goodwin fiddles in the foreground.

Finally, the third image shows my interpretation of the governments' solution to the credit crunch by depicting Gordon Brown as a Fairy Godmother and Alistair Darling as Tinkerbell, busily dropping off £700 billion in public money to rescue the bankers from a trip to their nearest Jobcentre.

I don't really know where this piece came from. It's kinda meant to signify my belief that the world was a more peaceful place when there were two superpowers - the US and USSR - and back in the days when referring to Britain as a "major power" actually meant something.

St. Peter's Seminary, Cardross

I'll be using these photos of St. Peter's Seminary in Cardross as the basis of my Advanced Visual Creativity Personal Project, in conjunction with sketchwork and collage ideas. My aim is to use the photography to depict St. Peter's as it appears now, and the sketchwork to depict my interpretation of what it looked like before it descended into its current ruinous state. I then plan to throw together a large collage of images interspersing the two styles of artwork.

Now, to give you some bumph about St. Peter's:

• Despite it's apparent ruinous, collapsing state, it is actually one of the few modern Category A-listed buildings in West Central Scotland.

• Designed by world renowned architects Gillespie, Kidd & Coia, with one eye very firmly on the works of Le Corbusier.

• Has been described by various sources as "a modern building of world significance" and "the finest example of post-modern brutalist architecture in the United Kingdom".

• Was included on the World Monument Fund's '100 Most Endangered Sites' list in both 2007 and 2008.

The building was originally intended to be used as a training college for Catholic priests, but just as it was being completed, the practice of teaching priests in seclusion from their eventual congregations was beginning to lose sway within the Catholic Chuch in Scotland, and as such, the building never came close to achieving full occupancy after it's official opening in 1966. From the outset, the building was riddled with structural and maintenace problems, mostly caused by substandard engineering and cost cutting during the construction process. It closed as a Seminary in 1980, and was used for a while as a drug treatment and rehabilitation centre, but the maintenance and engineering problems it had experienced earlier in its existence continued to plague the building, and as such, it had been completely vacated, stripped and left to the elements by the early 1990s.

More random Graphical nonsense

Some Warhol style Pop Art. All I've really done here is reproduce Warhol's original $ in triplicate and played about with the colour hue and saturation in Photoshop to create the yellow and green versions from the original red one. I've never claimed to be the most original artist or designer on the planet, but by the admittedly low standards of plagiarism, I think this turned out quite nicely!

I despise Caramel Wafers. It's like eating ten sheets of wafer thin MDF held together by a particularly sticky, unappealing wood glue, then covered in the kind of chocolate even Cadbury's would find insulting. Unfortunately, I couldn't use those facts as the basis for a 20' advertising billboard design, so I had to go with something a bit more mundane, and probably less libellous. They haven't changed in size (or flavour, I imagine) since they were first introduced in 1957. This piece was produced on the hoof in a few hours in response to one-day brief set by Levy McCallum. There was a prize and everything, which I'm kinda glad I didn't win!


Good old Lucas Electrics, the cause of sleepless nights for many a mechanic, and many a British Leyland customer!

Recyclage Deluxe! I despise the current campaign being run by Stella Artois, which purportedly focuses on the "environmental" credentials of the company. So the adverts take great pains to tell us that their bottles are made from 100% recycled glass, their cans are 50% recycled aluminium, and their packaging is 40% recycled cardboard. I decided to put this little piece together to tie into the current campaign, while simultaneously reflecting my personal belief about Stella Artois - the belief that it is, in fact, brewed from recycled urine!

Flash!

No, I'm not talking about flashing old ladies in the park.... I'm bored in a Flash tutorial class at Uni. That is all!

Life Drawing

Audi's New Logo

Before

After

I couldn't let this one go. As you may have noticed, I'm a Graphic Designer, and I've produced some pieces of work over the years that weren't quite as considered and cohesive as they might have been , and some which were blatantly half-arsed in their execution. But even I wouldn't have the cheek to deliver Audi's "new" corporate logo and expect them to pay me for it.

The new rendering of the much vaunted four rings is all well and dandy, and manages to give them a more realistic, 3 dimensional look than the older logo, but the new typography is utterly atrocious. Apparently it's a newly designed typeface called Audi Type, commissioned by Audi and designed by MetaDesign. Now, that's all well and good, but it doesn't stop the new typeface from looking very much like Verdana with the tracking increased and the X-height squished down.

The question is, did the logo actually need updating? My opinion on that is yes and no. The rings on the older logo are a little bit flat and two dimensional, but the typography is very, very distinctive and so closely associated with the brand that I find it very surprising that they decided to replace it with something so crushingly nondescript. Sure, the older type isn't perfect, with the odd issue here and there with its kerning, but I would've preferred to see it subtly redrawn and updated rather than scrapped and replaced by something which - I say again - looks like squished Verdana.

My solution to this design conundrum would be to use the new rendering of the rings with a subtly updated, redrawn version of the older typography.

On a side note, Audi have also ditched their fabulously over engineered, beautifully executed gas strut equipped parallelogram bootlid hinges in favour of the simpler, cheaper and uglier bent metal tubes so beloved of considerably more donwmarket carmakers. If this is cost cutting designed to save them a few euros in manufacturing costs, I say shame on them!

Maestro, if you please!

Austin Allegro, an ode to the worst car ever made....

It's hard to think where to begin with the Austin Allegro, a car of such staggeringly, stupefyingly misguided design and production incompetence it's hard to comprehend. Just look at it! It is without doubt one of the most ungainly, poorly proportioned cars ever unleashed on the world. Apparently, the original stylist had something far more lithe and graceful in mind, but unfortunately, he made the terrible mistake of working for British Leyland, a car company that would have had trouble producing an amateur dramatics production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, let alone something as complicated as an actual car.

It's hard to exaggerate just how badly BL screwed this car up. It was originally designed to fight the new wave of exotic and avant-garde hatchbacks that were cropping up all over continental Europe, but management decided that a hatchback configuration was still a tad controversial and ooh la la for us Brits, so they stuck an old fashioned saloon style boot on it. Then the engineers inisited on fitting BL's wheezy, underpowered and hideously tall B-series engine, which buggered up the styling even more. Then, in an instance of seizing defeat from the very jaws of victory - something which BL excelled at - some idiot in the design or marketing department thought it would be a BRILLIANT idea if they gave this upturned bathtub on wheels a SQUARE steering wheel - I kid you not. The poor thing was hamstrung from the start. A scant year before Volkswagen gave the world the genre-defining Golf in 1974, British Leyland foisted this atrocious lash-up on an unsuspecting market.

Of course, the story doesn't end there - once they'd finished buggering up it's development and actually got this pig faced disaster of a car into production, they hurled it together so badly that it started to fall apart after mere months of existence. British Leyland had an unshakeable belief that if a car had to rust, it might as well start doing so on the production line, and as it's going to get dents over the course of its life, it might as well leave the factory with panel filler already applied.
As you'd expect, this reputation for being ugly, wheezy, unreliable and poorly made pretty much killed the Allegro in export markets, but it didn't seem to dent British enthusiasm for the little underdog, as it managed to soldier on for 10 years, 3 facelifts and just over 640,000 examples.

Over that time, the Allegro did get a little bit better, and by 1980 had actually turned into a vaguely (make that VERY vaguely) decent car. Unfortunately, British Leyland, Leyland or Austin-Rover, as it was known that week, undid all their good work a scant four years later in 1984, when they replaced the Allegro with the equally incompetent Austin Maestro.... but that's another story, for another time....