This year June marks 10 years I have worked as a freelancer for Maters & Hermsen, a company that makes magazines (and teaching and organizing conferences). I started out as a graphic designer and slowly, little by little, I got to illustrate for these magazines too. I’ve grown so much over time and 10 years seems ridiculous.
One of the projects that kept coming back over the years is NVRG’s year report. A different theme each year, but with the same underlying concept: relationships between people. I’ve created out of the box illustrations for them, some of them – looking back now – not so good and others really cool. I’ve cut paper, I’ve laid out illustrations with thread and experimented with embroidery. None of them I want to show here, but I had fun trying things!
The latest theme was ‘profiling’: showing what you stand for and making yourself known to the world. These are the sketches I made and showed the client (as always there were many rough sketches before this: the thinking-on-paper-part). As you can see in the first two sketches I kept the separate items, but rearranged them a bit. And I changed the color palette.
It was quite a messy sketch, but since I’ve worked with this client many times before I am confident enough they can see through the rough sketches and have faith that the end result will not disappoint. No need here to waste precious time on perfect sketches.
In this case I did not only illustrate for the cover of this little booklet, but I also got to design it. I think I have mentioned it before, but it’s a great combination to design and illustrate a product. You get to adjust and tweak the illustration (and the design) to fit them together perfectly. As you can see here, I was able to make room for the title and the logo in the illustration. On the inside of the booklet I used many visuals, derived from this main illustration.
Here are a few older NVRG illustrations I made for them. The theme for this top one was ‘authenticity’. The one below was ‘family’. And the bottom one was ‘connection’
My illustrations on ‘connection’ are all over their website as well, so if you’re interested in seeing a little more, go ahead and check that out at nvrg.nl. Or you can have a look at my portfolio site where there is also more to see on this project.
