theycallmebushby

The Ministry of Stories is a popular not-for-profit creative writing and mentoring centre for young people aged 8–18 in East London.

Started by Nick Hornby, the Ministry helps young children to use their imagination to write and publish their own stories. However the Ministry has become so oversubscribed that they’re struggling to find enough volunteers to keep up with demand and help mentor the children who are desperate to learn.

To recruit volunteers we printed individual book pages using the stories the children wrote at the Ministry, and placed them into novels in bookstores throughout East London, helping to get their stories into the hands of the very people we needed.

The aim being to surprise the reader at the very moment they are doing what they could be doing as a volunteer at the Ministry – enjoying stories created by young people.

Client: Rich Catty, Ministry of Stories.

Agency: Leo Burnett London

Art Director: Liam Bushby

Copywriter: Alison Steven

Production: Darren Grieves, Tony Parsons

For more information please contact: 

I’ve recently been working with ‘Substance’ a company promoting the release of foreign language and art house films in the UK. Commissioned to create an alternative poster for ‘The New Girlfriend’ by Fraçois Ozon. It’s certainly one of the stranger films i’ve seen this year but full of interesting tension for a poster. The final design I ended up with was quite a simple image, referencing the changing vision of the lead character, as well as their physical transformation; with sunglasses providing both a disguise and a new perspective - a theme I took directly from the film. 

I’ve now got a few other commissions to keep me busy so i’ll no doubt be posting again soon. 

My alternative movie poster for 'Whiplash' following it's 3 Oscar wins last night.

I've been working away on this little poster for a while now. I loved this movie a lot. It was so well shot and produced and of course J.K Simmons was superb (with some great lines). 

There's been so many great movies this year. The one movie that I felt kind of got a raw deal at the Oscars was 'Nightcrawler' by Dan Gilroy. It was a great character study and Jake Gyllenhaal was great in the lead role, but there's always one movie that slips under the radar, screenplay nod aside.

Before the brilliant 'The Grand Budapest Hotel' was released I was working on an alternative movie poster for it. I was playing around with loads of different designs which just didn't seem to be working for me. This led me to going with the simplicity of the magnifying glass and the stamp - an illustration i've blogged about previously. However when I was clearing up my folders I stumbled upon this design. Previously i'd liked it but it just didn't seem to fit into my minimal style that I was developing. When I came back to it though, I felt like it had a nice clean graphic feel to it despite there being more elements to it than I would usually go for. So after a little bit of tweaking and finishing up i've decided to stick it up here to see what you guys think. Let me know your thoughts in the comments. 

Here's a new illustration i've been working on recently. It began as a slightly different design which was for The Hate Mail Show and promoted their show a couple of weeks back. But I really liked the image and the colour pallette and wanted to make it a stand alone illustration.

I've been pretty busy over the last few months hence the lack of posts up here. I've been working on posters for The Hate Mail Show, as well as an EP sleeve for 'Fractions' a dreamy synth-pop band from the north of England - https://soundcloud.com/fractionsuk - I've also fitted in a fair bit of self-initiated work in spare moments so the blog really is due for a bit of an update.

Here's a sneak peack of the sleeve for Fractions. They'll be releasing their debut EP in September so make sure you watch our for that as well as more songs on their Soundlcloud page.

I was very excited for the new Wes Anderson movie coming out and was looking forward to doing a poster for it. I did one for his last film 'Moonrise Kingdom' and that went down pretty well, so why not this one.

After seeing the trailer to 'The Grand Budapest Hotel' I knew I had to design one. Why? First off, the colours. This movie has such an amazing colour palette. The mix of pale pink, acid red and deep purple. It shouldn't work but like so many of Wes' ideas, it just does. I had a lot of different ideas of what I wanted to do for the poster. I mulled over some ideas and then I was set. However following that I started having doubts and actually did 3 or 4 different designs for different ideas. Something just wasn't clicking for me. I wanted to base the poster around the hotel or the lobby. I created some stuff I was kind of happy with but eventually I figured it out. Everything I was doing was too complex. It was to intricate and that isn't my style. I like white space. I needed something simple. A motif, rather than some sort of 'scene' or 'space'. 

I thought on this some more and ended up on the stamp. With doing the posters for The Hate Mail Show I have been using a stamp design and it just felt like the correct way to go. It actually began when I was designing mail. A letter addressed to M. Gustave but again it wasn't simple enough. So I lost the letter (or the 'scene') and just concentrated on the stamp. And then, what is more Wes Anderson than a magnifying glass? He has used them throughout his films and I knew from the trailer that The Grand Budapest Hotel would feature one, so that was me set.