Strange Creatures Publishing

LOGO, BUSINESS CARD, LETTERHEAD, SIGNAGE

Adbusters Media Foundation — Branding
Every couple of months, for three years, Adbusters changed its social media branding, requiring a refresh of banners across all platforms, as well as a rethink of content aesthetics. The pace was demanding, but the skills it engendered were rewarding.

Branding for initiatives like the "Mind Bombs" or variously branded newsletters were constantly in demand, to address the ever-shifting priorities of Adbusters editorial.

Island Gutters — Logo
For Island Gutters, the client wanted an evolution of their former branding. In the discovery phase, I found out that the client's favourite hockey team was the Colorado Avalanche, so I included a thumbnail in my pitch that referenced their logo. The client loved it.

The water in the finished logo was a difficult element to create, because it needed to feel organic, so I ended up drawing it physically, then scanning and simplifying from there.

BOOK, POSTER, BROCHURE & FLYER, MENU

Fossil Free London and Just Stop Oil — Poster
Designed as a collaboration between British environmental orgs Just Stop Oil and Fossil Free London. The logo and colour branding for both orgs is distinctive, so versioning it was simple once the layout was locked in.

The offset text reads "THIS KICK ARSE RESISTANCE". Not everyone will see it, but it's a fun touch for the more observant. This was the third major poster campaign I've done for Fossil Free London.

Bad Wizards Club 2 — Zine
The second issue of Bad Wizards Club I produced, and one of three successful Kickstarter campaigns I ran. Bad Wizards Club was a chance to collaborate with a group of talented artists and writers from around the world on creating something lighthearted and fun.

Along with designing, editing, printing, promoting, and distributing, I produced a series of wizard illustrations. Some were featured in the zine itself, and others in promotional material — but this was the first.

WEBSITE, SOCIAL MEDIA, NEWSLETTERS, ICONS

Adbusters Media Foundation — Social Media
Two recurring Adbusters posts are the Global Referendum post and the Moon Day post. The template and style I created for the Global Referendum was very constrained, but that gave me space to play around with the specific images used, as well as breaking the rules when needed.

Moon Day, on the other hand, was an opportunity to cut loose stylistically, while keeping the specificity of the moon imagery. Both approaches yielded a tremendous amount of practice in designing for social media.

Fantasy Character Creator — Website
What initially started as a fun personal project, building a random character generator using the Perchance Engine, turned into some 4000 lines of generator code and variables and 300 lines of CSS and HTML.

The generator has been a great sandbox for trying out innovative css solutions and learning to forego the content management systems (CMS) that promise to take all the code out of your hands, and leave you with none of the flexibility of pure HTML.

LABELS, PACKAGING, MERCH, GRAPHIC ELEMENTS

Adbusters Media Foundation — Spoof Ads
One of the things Adbusters Magazine is most famous for is its spoof ads, pillorying brands and corporations in their own style. I was fortunate to be able to revive the practice, during my tenure, for a series of new spoof ads targeting brands for their greenwashing tactics.

It's an excercise both of learning the house style and learning the template for particular campaigns, and then learning to break them in ways that transform the messaging.

Adbusters Media Foundation — Book Promo
I was in charge of the visual end of promotion for Adbusters latest book, Manifesto For World Revolution. Social media audiences will quickly tire of the same format of promotion if you are selling them something, so we ran as many series, each with multiple iterations, as we could, over the course of the year, and ended up selling thousands of copies of the book.

One that I found particularly compelling was a series of quotes about the book from notable climate activists. Talking heads with an air of anarchic minimalism and playful text boxes.

Writing Samples

Adbusters

Sparx Publishing Long Form:

PRM Magazine

Poetry Journals

Other Personal Writing

Strange Creatures Publishing is the personal design studio and imprint of William Davies.

A full-scope design studio. Our goal is helping you to realize your unique creative vision. We specialize in physically designed work, meticulously produced print media, and web design that breaks the staid tropes of modern web composition. Working from Pender Island BC. Working for you, wherever the signal reaches.

STRANGE CREATURES PUBLISHING