The City Character Sketches

Because I need something to occupy myself in the ten minutes every day between changing my son’s nappies and my daily nervous breakdown, I realised that I need to start a new project. The City is an idea for a comic that I’ve been thinking about for a while now, and it’s finally approaching the stage where I might be able to post a few pages in the next few weeks. It’ll be a mixture of spy fiction, gag strips and Kafka, inspired by the great proto-comic by Frans Masereel (of whom more later). I’m not sure when I’ll get the whole thing going, but here are some preliminary character designs to be getting on with.

Arbeit Macht Fries

Here’s a rather sillier poster than the last one, to protest the brutal suppression of chips by McDonald’s in the London Olympics.

I fear it may have missed its ideal cultural moment, but it was a special request, so I couldn’t abandon it. Especially not after my wife came up with the amazing pun.

Tax the Rich

Download in colour
Download in black and white

To celebrate the UK financial industry’s £92 million of lobbying last year, how about some political messaging? Anyone who follows me on twitter knows that I’m tiresomely interested in politics. For some time now I’ve been thinking about combining that interest with design by making some freely available political posters.

Anyone remember UK Uncut? I loved the simplicity of their message: don’t cut public services. Every other important principle for the Left right now follows logically from that. Austerity solves nothing. The government creates value. Firing people makes things worse, not better.

Any suggestions in that direction are shouted down with incomprehensible gibberish about bond yields. But there is a simple alternative to both cutting and borrowing. Tax the rich, you idiots. You say they’ll leave? What good are they doing here anyway if they don’t pay tax? It looks like the only thing approaching an economic plan that the Tories have is to convert Britain into a tax haven, where the idle rich can live in luxury, but the council can’t afford to collect the rubbish.

So here you are. Take my pig poster, and do what you will with it. It’s A3 size, in either colour or black and white.


Tax the Rich by Stephen Crowe is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Changes are afoot

Watch this space.

Technology 1:0 Stephen

I just fixed a problem with my email. If you sent me a message and I didn’t respond, please send it again!

Partition Poster

I just finished this poster for Partition, a short film directed by Emile Rafael, and screening, as you can see, in Prague on February 10th. If that’s where you are, then this is where you should be going! There’ll be booze!

I was really happy to get a chance to use some of the open source fonts provided by the amazing League of Movable Type. Those guys are great! I also would have been lost without Manfred Klein’s Ultra Condensed Sans.

Sonicfox animated

Apparently, having a logo that doesn’t move nowadays is liking having leprosy, which is why I was asked to animate my logo for Sonicfox Production Company. It’s the first animation I’ve ever done using Flash and After Effects, and while it’s a bit rudimentary in some ways, I am happy with his bouncy little tail. Look at it go!