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Picture Book Author & IllustratorPaddy Donnelly

Minicorp - Build What You Love

Minicorp - Build What You Love Minicorp - Build What You Love

Brian from Minicorp got in touch with me to create an inspirational poster for their office walls. The brief was "You have complete creative freedom. Go do what you love. Just include our logo and the phrase, build what you love - love what you build".

The Idea

Pretty early on in the design process I had this vision of a huge MiniCorp logo with lots of detail on it, plenty of action going on around it, people climbing on it etc. The 'build' part of the theme was floating around in my head and eventually I settled on a partially constructed version of the Minicorp buildings logo as the main focus for the illustration, symbolising the company vision the guys are working on right now. I had toyed with the idea of a purely typographical poster, however Brian made it clear that he came to me for my illustration skills and wanted something more illustration based with the 'Build What You Love' as more of a tagline.

Sketching

I'm a huge fan of retro futurism, flying machines, spaceships and I love putting together little 'scenes' of things under construction. Brian mentioned that this should include things that I love to build as well, so I sketched out a few ideas for the huge Minicorp buildings and the little cranes and flying machines constructing them. Wanting very few straight lines in this illustration, I started with crooked versions of the buildings and spindly, bendy legs for the cranes.

Colouring

I explored various colouring options for the sky, buildings, landscape, machines. I began from the idea of having the three buildings in different colours with different flying machines carrying various coloured pieces all over the place, but eventually I could see we were missing the visual link between these buildings and the Minicorp green logo. As soon as I dipped the constructions in green, it was clear that these were the Minicorp headquarters featured in the illustration.

Two things I wanted from this was quite an alien colouring for the landscape, as well as the 3 buildings standing out from it. After a bit of experimentation with the sky and mountains in the backgrounds I settled on something I was happy with.

The Finished Result

And there you have it! The Build What You Love/Love What You Build poster. It was a lot of fun working on this for the MiniCorp guys. Can't wait to see it hung up in the office next time I'm over in Dublin!

View the poster

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