Design Student Spotlight 1: Mike Messina

Like many designers and design companies I quite often receive CV’s and samples of work from design students. As much as I’d love to employ these designers I’m currently not in the position to do so, so rather than keeping hold of their work until the chance arises I thought I’d give some of it abit of a airing on here in a series of design student spotlights.
This will hopefully help raise their profiles or maybe another design company might snap them up and employ them!
So I’m now starting to feature designers who’s work interests me and the first of this series is Mike Messina, I really like the hand drawn approach and the slightly odd subject subject matter. Below Mike talks us through some of the design project.
If you are interested in Mike’s work you can see more at: www.mikemessina.co.uk


Crafted Motion Booklet
I wanted to explore the current movement in illustration and typography, which involves more designers choosing to use more traditional techniques, rather than using the computer for everything. I created the booklet to highlight this movement and I incorporated my own handcrafted typeface to inspire more hand-generated designs.

Anthropology Book jackets
This was a great brief, which was to create a series of six book jacket designs for an academic publisher, with the target audience being academic students of a wide age range. I really wanted to do something different, so I explored the idea of using actual anatomy diagrams along with blueprint style graphics to really give the subject matter a real fresh and strong visual representation.

D&AD Self-Illustrated Book
This brief was really interesting; I had to create a 16 page, hardbound book that was all about myself. I explored all areas such as my past, fears and thoughts (displayed below). I tried to really showcase what I can do with illustration and typography, trying new things and it was really a lot of fun to do.

Jazz Legends CD Box set FOR Sony Bmg Music
This brief was all about giving the brand and cd’s themselves a facelift, in order to encourage new Jazz fans to buy their box sets. I decided to tie the theme together with the idea of an old jazz lounge, Making the cd case a scuffed, leather record case and the cd’s themselves into music posters, varying for each artist in style and for the time period.