Brett Dorrans

illustrator / designer / visual artist

Hi! My name is Brett Dorrans. I'm an illustrator from Glasgow, although I studied at Edinburgh College of Art. I still live in that city amongst piles of pens, paper and ink.

I love vivid colours and playing with whitespace, and I design for print, the web and a variety of new media.

My interests are broad and eclectic and I draw from disparate influences including science-fiction, literature, philosophy, science and popular culture. Sometimes I find it hard to switch my brain off.

When I'm not doodling I can usually be found playing one of my numerous instruments (badly), cooking, listening to audio books or settling down with a cup of tea and some biscuits.

I love working with people who share my enthusiasm. If you think you might be one of them, feel free to drop me a line.

What I do

Illustration

Design for Print

Design for the Web

Branding

Packaging Design

Interface Design

Typography

How I do it

Photoshop

Illustrator

InDesign

Dreamweaver

Flash

HTML/XHTML/CSS

Javascript/jQuery/PHP

Me on the web

Twitter Facebook Last.fm

This has taken so bloody long to get working…

Posted by Brett on March 2, 2011 at 8:39 pm — permalink

But it’s done now, finally!

Website overhaul

Posted by Brett on January 18, 2011 at 5:28 pm — permalink

If you’ve visited my website before, you may have noticed that it’s undergone a little bit of an overhaul. There were several reasons why I did this, despite lots of positive feedback on the last design: the old horizontal navigation method was a bit flaky on some browsers (Chrome, and especially older ones), it was difficult to keep up to date and there was an inherent rigidity making it difficult to add more pieces of work beyond nine. The new design (hopefully) addresses all these problems. It also follows a consistent style through into my WIP game website (more information on that later).

Please let me know of any problems you encounter while using the new site!

Something a little different…

Posted by Brett on October 13, 2010 at 2:59 am — permalink

I’ve been asked to design a logo for an interesting startup company. Big secret project, lots of cool technology and thought is being worked into it. This project is particularly interesting for me, as someone who is interested in linguistics, because part of the brief required designing a logotype in another language: Cree syllabics. It was an interesting challenge and I found it very rewarding. Please note that this piece remains WIP!

Some recent editorial work

Posted by Brett on October 3, 2010 at 7:40 pm — permalink

Here are some quick editorial illustrations. The image on the left refers to a news story involving Satan appearing on some bathroom tiles; naturally I chose to represent the Dark Lord as Jeremy Kyle. The illustration the right was produced for an article on a “Bee Beard” competition. Bees plus beards naturally means the Bee Gees.

Inspiration for the “stay in a hive” gag courtesy of evannave.

Ana Somnia

Posted by Brett on October 1, 2010 at 5:54 am — permalink

I stumbled across this amazing animation: http://anasomnia.com/

Little hint: turn off the lights.

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