River Island Style Insider
Art Direction / Production / Design / Artwork
Creatively leading the creation and delivery of more than 25 seasonal print magazines over my 2 years with River Island, featuring inspirational fashion and lifestyle content for Women, Men and Kids.
Once briefed by fashion teams on the product focus for the season, I would design the entirety of the magazines, including layout, bespoke typography and image sourcing, finishing in preparing and sending to print. Further to this, I art directed and produced all studio imagery included in the magazines.
For a more in depth look at the images I produced, please take a look at my Art Direction page.
MW Fashion History: Whether it's my style or not, I love learning the origins of a trend. Sportswear transcends seasons and function and is a constant in the world of fashion, so it made sense to include this educational piece in our menswear magazine when focusing on activewear pieces. Using a collection of found images, I created a collage which represented the products on offer, and briefed the pieces to be shot in a slightly anthropomorphic placement to represent movement.
WW Feature: For each magazine we made sure to cover customers of all different shapes and sizes. We reached out to Hannah Almassi from ‘Who What Wear’ in which she styled some product from the petite range. Hannah sent us her own imagery, and I designed this page to go along with her interview and the photo’s she took for us. Throughout this issue of the magazine I had been drawing little icons as seen at the bottom of the right hand page, so carried on with that for this feature.
MW Trend: Using celebrity influence is a great way to promote a trend, as well as educating the customer on how to style an item rather than just wear one. Here I designed a page giving the reader tips on how to master neutrals with ‘Do’ and ‘Don’t’ pointers, by dividing the page and using found imagery of aspirational icons. I then briefed the product on sale to be shot in a way that I could continue this notebook style design.
RI Design Forum: For AW17, River Island partnered with the vibrant and unique fashion designer, Ashish. For the spread, I took elements of his pieces in the campaign images, such as the multi-coloured lettering and continued this through the design as well as matching the images to the angles of his lettering.
WW Trends: I designed this spread, and concepted all the imagery on the right page to be shot in the creative studio. There was a theme of splicing for this season, which was the reason for the cut up outfits. I think this works well to show the product both as an outfit, but also as individual pieces. For the section underneath I wanted to create a world for the trend, and did this by choosing location, key object and street style imagery, then cutting out the scene by hand and getting it shot on an infinity background to create depth.
MW Feature: In each magazine we featured a member of the RI Head Office, to invite the customers into our world. This season, Nick Tahir, Menswear Buying Director was given a Q&A style spread, which I designed to incorporate a mix of shots, some including him and some still life imagery to represent him in his role. These were shot in our studio, with a mix of colour and black and white to represent the style of product he had chosen to feature.
McArthurGlen Advertorials
Art Direction / Design
Over the seasons spent working for this client at VCCP, I conceived and designed hundreds of seasonal template packs for McArthurGlen, featuring fashion trends and product, promotions, events, tourism and B2B messaging, rolled out across global markets. Featured here is merely a selection!
For a more detailed look at my Art Direction work for VCCP and McArthurGlen, please take a look here.
