Graphic Design

BACKGROUND INFORMATION

Something I also use the computer for is CD covers, posters, sheet music covers and art books. Working together with artists is stimulating. It gives new insights, and you get to test new areas that you didn't know existed. I like making fascinating pictures.

Some articles need real snazzy opening pictures. It can't get very much snazzier than this, can it? It was an article about a Swedish hospital that needed an interesting introduction, so I had an X-ray made of a keyboard, and another one of my hands pretending to be on the keyboard. Later I scanned the X-ray films, colorized them and joined them in Photoshop, creating color-X-ray. It does catch the eye. And this is what it looks like when you X-ray a keyboard at a hospital.

Screen prints, sheet music and CD covers may not be very exotic, but how about necktie design and pentagonal postcards? You can try various types of unusual printed items: building kits, three dimensional cardboard figures, foil printing or some other kind of profiling material, which will make your customers remember your company for ever. Posters can be made more exciting with added gold or silver foil. Thios is all about Prepress, a nicer word for creating printed items on a PC and make them look good after printing. The colours should match, and the print shop should be able to print at the lowest possible cost.

Technical Graphics

Technical graphics should be clear, pedagogic and most of all, nice to look at. No matter how correct an illustration might be, if it's complicated or ugly, no one will even try to understand it. I have been through most of it; maps, cutaway views, system overviews and various types of three-dimensional graphics.

Maps

The simplest type of map, a topographical map with an overlaid description, in this case a computer network covering the Swedish Härjedalen district

The coverage of Stockholm Radio was best illustrated with two maps, one of Sweden and one world map, with symbols for all the odd expeditions they have communicated with.

A three-dimensional view of how Stockholm Radio communicates within Sweden, and its connetcions to various networks

The airspace controlled by the Arlanda Air Traffic Control Centre, is best illustrated as a three-dimensional model of the atmosphere

This is how trhe Swedish iron ore mine Kirunavaara looks in a cutaway view. The bottom part is drawn, whereas the top is a photo of the mine-mountain I made just as the plane was landing at Kiruna Airport

System Overviews and Exploded Views

The ATLAS-detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in CERN in Geneva, Switzerland is a magnificent design, 10 stories high, 44 metres long, 100 metres below ground. It will help us understand the innermost secrets of nature.

The Super Proton Synchrotron, SPS at CERN is an intermediate storage ring, 2.2 kilometres in diametre, which is used for accelerating protons for the LHC ring. To draw this picture I had to interview five different scientists.

Large, complex systems are best explained by a simplified sketch. This is the communications systems on the Öresund Bridge all stretched out in a pedagogic manner.

There is nothing as complicated as a nuclear power plant. This is the Forsmark power plant, Block One shown simplified

Swipnet, the Swedish IP Network of Tele2 Internet Service Provider is a country-wide computer network branching off to Europe, the Baltics and to the US. Viking Line's Amorella in a much acclaimed sideways cutaway view, showing all the major local area networks, fire alarms, telephony and video distribution. This drawing is buit up from a discussion, as Viking Line didn't have such a drawing to begin with.

The computer networks of the Globe Arena, the roundest building in Stockholm in a sideways cutaway. I took the basic construction drawings and added cabling, equipment, colours and captions.

The computer networks of the Globe Arena. The bottom floor is white, while the cellar is blue. The bottom floor has been cut away in interesting places to show the cellar.

Swedish Gotland Class submarine. I visited the submarine and got all the details by discussing with the captain. The original image is made by Kockums, the shipbuilder, but added on by me.

Diagrams and Long Processes

The Seti@Home project shares the radio spectrum with an innumerable amount of other services. The hydrogen in space emits at around 1421 MHz, the area coloured pink in the illustration

Chocolate manufacturing at the Marabou factory in Upplands-Väsby, north of Stockholm, was made into one long picture fitting nicely along the bottom of one magazine spread.

Now it starts getting complicated. This illustration shows the signal processing done in the Berekely University Seti@Home project, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

“Captain Cipher saves the World,” subtitled “World War II for Dummies,” a short cartoon about encryption technology during the war, and how Bletchley Park, the British deciphering office reclaimed its place among the great heroes of the war.

Photo Rework

Before: An ordinary MRI scan taken from a digital image storage system at Astrid Lindgren's Childrens Hosptal in Stockholm. I felt it needed some more of Astrid's fairyland.

After: These newly discovered areas in the brain are all named after figures in Astrid Lindgren's books. A boring image turned into something funny and thought-provoking.

Before: A not too exciting image of a Stockholm-based cruise-liner...

After: ...turned into a funny party image, after a lot of Photoshop magic, and a few old fireworks pictures used as background, such as this one.

Poster with a Purpose The biggest poster I have ever made, I made for the educational department of the Swedish company Data Construction. Actually, I made two posters, one red and one blue, measuring 1 x 1.5 metres, showing how to configure the print queues in NetWare 3.x. Novell NetWare is a really wonderful operating system and the only part one usually doesn't praise is the printing configuration. If you click on the thumbnail, you will download one of the posters. Please be patient; it is very large. The poster shows the full system of menus and dialogue boxes of PCONSOLE, the print queue management program. The general idea is that you select some common management problem or administrative task in the list to the right. At the end of each text is a colour coded coordinate, and you are supposed to locate this coordinate on the grid, which shows where the remedy should be applied. Then you just follow the arrows backwards, to see how to navigate to reach the right spot.

General Graphic Production

Ralph Lundsten's book “Lustifications” (Lustbarheter) was the first book published in Sweden containing a CD record. A very artistic and beautiful book, with many memorable words. Everything was designed in Ventura Publisher.

Covers for CD records, the screen print on the record itself and the rubber cliché for the music cassette. Everything designed in CorelDRAW.

This is the cover of Ralph Lundsten's ACD 20 “In Time and Space,” containing some lovely Hawaiian-style music. A human choir has been used. ©Andromeda Music 1995.

This is the cover of Ralph Lundsten's ACD 21 “The Seasons/Årstiderna,” Every composer with some self esteem must have a “Seasons.” ©Andromeda Music 1996.

At Christmas-time 1995 Ralph Lundsten's organ version of “A Midwinter Tale” was released. The cover is made entirely in CorelDRAW. ©Andromeda Music 1996.

An advertisment poster for Sony Music, with the purpose of increasing sales for Ralph Lundsten's musical production.

A one and a half metre (4.5 ft.) sign for a café in northern Sweden, designed in CorelDRAW. The customer was Ralph Lundstengården (The Ralph Lundsten Museum), a museum dedicated to our national composer Ralph Lundsten. The sign was created in close co-operation with the artist, the graphic was cleaned of all unnecessary vectors... ...and exported as an EPS file for the signmaker factory. After manufacture, the sign looked like this.

This is a CD box made for four of Ralph's earlier Nature Symphonies, re-issued in 1999. I used many different programs, such as CorelDRAW, Photoshop and Page Maker. ©Andromeda Music 1999. There's nothing here right now.

Some Odd Graphics

QED AB sponsored two Science Fiction conventions in Stockholm, both of them named ConScience, in 1993 and 1995. Other colleagues were also sponsoring. On top of this, I was commissioned to make the layout of the convention books, all posters and more.

In connection with other commissions I have sometimes designed business cards for various companies.

One very interesting job was to layout pentagonal postcards for a Danish artist. Not only should the image enhancement be properly made, but all the postcards had to be fitted nicely so they could be printed in the most efficient way on one sheet of paper.

This poster turned out very well. The highlights are printed in silver and the effect when the sun shines on it is fantastic (or should we say, “what was expected”).

Scanning and vectorising

A large amount of logotypes from well known manufacturers were needed for a product catalogue. Having the manufacturers themselves sending logotypes on machine readable format, sometimes gave very funny results. I had to scan some one hundred logotype sheets, vectorise and then manually optimise them in CorelDRAW. This is how it turned out.

These lgotypes may not be completely up to date, as logotypes are changed all the time, but that's beside the point in this context.

All names, trade marks or registered trade marks are the property of their respective owners; they are used here for demonstrational purposes only, without intent of infringement.

Maps
	The simplest type of map, a topographical map with an overlaid description, in this case a computer network covering the Swedish Härjedalen district		The coverage of Stockholm Radio was best illustrated with two maps, one of Sweden and one world map, with symbols for all the odd expeditions they have communicated with.
	A three-dimensional view of how Stockholm Radio communicates within Sweden, and its connetcions to various networks		The airspace controlled by the Arlanda Air Traffic Control Centre, is best illustrated as a three-dimensional model of the atmosphere
	This is how trhe Swedish iron ore mine Kirunavaara looks in a cutaway view. The bottom part is drawn, whereas the top is a photo of the mine-mountain I made just as the plane was landing at Kiruna Airport
System Overviews and Exploded Views
	The ATLAS-detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in CERN in Geneva, Switzerland is a magnificent design, 10 stories high, 44 metres long, 100 metres below ground. It will help us understand the innermost secrets of nature.		The Super Proton Synchrotron, SPS at CERN is an intermediate storage ring, 2.2 kilometres in diametre, which is used for accelerating protons for the LHC ring. To draw this picture I had to interview five different scientists.
	Large, complex systems are best explained by a simplified sketch. This is the communications systems on the Öresund Bridge all stretched out in a pedagogic manner.		There is nothing as complicated as a nuclear power plant. This is the Forsmark power plant, Block One shown simplified
	Swipnet, the Swedish IP Network of Tele2 Internet Service Provider is a country-wide computer network branching off to Europe, the Baltics and to the US.		Viking Line's Amorella in a much acclaimed sideways cutaway view, showing all the major local area networks, fire alarms, telephony and video distribution. This drawing is buit up from a discussion, as Viking Line didn't have such a drawing to begin with.
	The computer networks of the Globe Arena, the roundest building in Stockholm in a sideways cutaway. I took the basic construction drawings and added cabling, equipment, colours and captions.		The computer networks of the Globe Arena. The bottom floor is white, while the cellar is blue. The bottom floor has been cut away in interesting places to show the cellar.
	Swedish Gotland Class submarine. I visited the submarine and got all the details by discussing with the captain. The original image is made by Kockums, the shipbuilder, but added on by me.
Diagrams and Long Processes
		The Seti@Home project shares the radio spectrum with an innumerable amount of other services. The hydrogen in space emits at around 1421 MHz, the area coloured pink in the illustration
		Chocolate manufacturing at the Marabou factory in Upplands-Väsby, north of Stockholm, was made into one long picture fitting nicely along the bottom of one magazine spread.
	Now it starts getting complicated. This illustration shows the signal processing done in the Berekely University Seti@Home project, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.		“Captain Cipher saves the World,” subtitled “World War II for Dummies,” a short cartoon about encryption technology during the war, and how Bletchley Park, the British deciphering office reclaimed its place among the great heroes of the war.
Photo Rework
	Before: An ordinary MRI scan taken from a digital image storage system at Astrid Lindgren's Childrens Hosptal in Stockholm. I felt it needed some more of Astrid's fairyland.		After: These newly discovered areas in the brain are all named after figures in Astrid Lindgren's books. A boring image turned into something funny and thought-provoking.
	Before: A not too exciting image of a Stockholm-based cruise-liner...		After: ...turned into a funny party image, after a lot of Photoshop magic, and a few old fireworks pictures used as background, such as this one.

Ralph Lundsten's book “Lustifications” (Lustbarheter) was the first book published in Sweden containing a CD record. A very artistic and beautiful book, with many memorable words. Everything was designed in Ventura Publisher.	Covers for CD records, the screen print on the record itself and the rubber cliché for the music cassette. Everything designed in CorelDRAW.
This is the cover of Ralph Lundsten's ACD 20 “In Time and Space,” containing some lovely Hawaiian-style music. A human choir has been used. ©Andromeda Music 1995.	This is the cover of Ralph Lundsten's ACD 21 “The Seasons/Årstiderna,” Every composer with some self esteem must have a “Seasons.” ©Andromeda Music 1996.
At Christmas-time 1995 Ralph Lundsten's organ version of “A Midwinter Tale” was released. The cover is made entirely in CorelDRAW. ©Andromeda Music 1996.	An advertisment poster for Sony Music, with the purpose of increasing sales for Ralph Lundsten's musical production.
A one and a half metre (4.5 ft.) sign for a café in northern Sweden, designed in CorelDRAW. The customer was Ralph Lundstengården (The Ralph Lundsten Museum), a museum dedicated to our national composer Ralph Lundsten. The sign was created in close co-operation with the artist, the graphic was cleaned of all unnecessary vectors...	...and exported as an EPS file for the signmaker factory. After manufacture, the sign looked like this.
This is a CD box made for four of Ralph's earlier Nature Symphonies, re-issued in 1999. I used many different programs, such as CorelDRAW, Photoshop and Page Maker. ©Andromeda Music 1999.	There's nothing here right now.

QED AB sponsored two Science Fiction conventions in Stockholm, both of them named ConScience, in 1993 and 1995. Other colleagues were also sponsoring. On top of this, I was commissioned to make the layout of the convention books, all posters and more.	In connection with other commissions I have sometimes designed business cards for various companies.
One very interesting job was to layout pentagonal postcards for a Danish artist. Not only should the image enhancement be properly made, but all the postcards had to be fitted nicely so they could be printed in the most efficient way on one sheet of paper.	This poster turned out very well. The highlights are printed in silver and the effect when the sun shines on it is fantastic (or should we say, “what was expected”).