New Beginning

Welcome to Photography And Design Australia Pty. ltd.

After 20 years in professional design studios since completing a 4 year Bachelor of Design and as Director and founder of Up Productions for the last 15 years, I have a new start.

I’m excited for the future and look forward to offering work at the absolute best of my ability as I always do for every job and for every client. Maybe soon my hair will fall out.

We’ve come a long way since the introduction of computers and digital imaging to everyday design tasks, of which I saw the very beginnings.

A sample layout from the Giant Bicycles Australia consumer catalogue of 2003 shows a mix of new and old… 

• Slide scans of the lifestyle images taken with a film camera and the accompanying dust and scratch fix-ups in Photoshop together with advanced selections and colorizing. This was new stuff!
• Logo design of each little icon. There were probably at least 20 different ones throughout the catalogue.
• Manufacture of realistic looking colour-bars in Photoshop to illustrate available paint colours of the bike model. Maybe 100 of those.
• Studio photography of the bicycles using a top of the range, $6000, 4-megapixel camera – yes – just 4MP 😉 also using old-style redhead tungsten lighting, 3 of them did it. 58 models of bike photographed. These days we would do that in 1.5 days, back then maybe 4.
• Graphic layout and text all in Photoshop – maybe version 3.

The entire catalogue design and layout, photography, marketing text and product specifications put together by 3 individuals. It achieved a top-four rating in The Australian Catalogue Awards competing against the very largest of world-wide marketing and design agencies.

Well – these days the catalogues are much more detailed and often still take a while to create. We do closer to 300 pages now instead of 48.  While some processes have really developed and the time it takes for various tasks has reduced significantly, it still takes  a dedicated creative brain to sort through the material and come up with a nicely styled layout that easily conveys all the important information.

Thanks for the support, 

Richard Dodson