Bertie Blackman, originally uploaded by Ben Grubb.

Last week I went to see a rather splendid gig by Australian songstress Bertie Blackman. I hadn’t really heard of her before until Katy from Creative Boom asked me to go along and write a review and take some photos. It turns out I actually really like Bertie’s music. I listened to her latest album ‘Secrets and Lies’ which is out in May and it’s rather splendid. The show was hugely enjoyable as well. For a petite little thing she certainly has a really powerful set of lungs, and really belt the tunes out. You can read the review now on Creative Boom; and there’s a selection of shots from the night up on Flickr. I also did a video interview(!!) with her which should be up on Creative Boom some point soon. Hopefully. It went pretty, and was a largely enjoyable (yet nerve wracking) experience. Michael Parkinson I am not.

I also caught the band on before Bertie who weren’t bad either: Sheffield based act The Little Million, who I also managed to get some decent photos of. Result! I’m also, through the power of the internetz, seeing them again tonight to take some more shots. It’s been a busy time. And the sun’s out which is nice. Here’s to a decent Spring and Summer I say!

Recently on Twitter, a friend of mine called Tracey (aka MissOceania) retweeted a message creative website/bloggy type thing called Creative Boom. They were putting a call out to designers to produce a banner for their site. There was no real brief other than that. They sent me their logo which needed to be included, and I spent one night last weekend sat in front of highlights from the Reading festival, putting together a banner. It went well, and it’s now live on the site: www.creativeboom.co.uk!

…and here’s the banner in all it’s glory:

It’s nice to have turned something around so quickly and to see it up live is even better! They’ve also featured me in their LookBook feature which is great as well! There’s nothing like some free advertising, eh? Katy who runs the site seemed to really like it, and has asked me to have more design input to the site which is pretty exciting (and equally nerve wracking) for me. I’ll keep you posted. Until then, check out Creative Boom – There’s some really interesting articles and work on there!