He’s got a great natural style and being young has time on his side. He’s been taking time out to decide how best to tackle a career in creativity. “I can’t wait to see the finished book, I think it’s going to be truly extraordinary, looking at the wonderful array of designers and illustrators who are taking part. I’m proud to be a part of it,” he says.

That goes for us too. The book is at the printers right now and after all the work everyone has put in we just can’t wait to see it.

This image John sent us is another charity piece he had done, for Lifeline. Nice. Thanks for getting in touch and being part of the project John.

Oscar was born in Spain, moved to America to study commercial art, before relocating to London where he’s worked in advertising as well as setting up as a freelance illustrator. If you check out his site here, you’ll see that he’s got great skills in character and caricature work – exaggeration, lots of fun, and visual puns aplenty. He’s equally happy working in Photoshop and watercolour and the texture and depth of natural media shows through in his style. We send our thanks to Oscar for joining the project, it’s great to have him on board.

Olga also works under the pseudonym 10am, and took a break from studio work last year to pursue personal projects in silk screening and print making, and she enjoys making books. There’s personal motivation behind her decision to get in touch with us, download our brief, and create an illustration for the Joe Kriss poem, Otherside. Olga sadly lost her father to cancer three years ago.

We’re all really pleased she decided to work with us, and let me tell you, her work looks fantastic in the layout. The book has been sent to the printers now – more news on our launch date soon. In the meantime, check out Olga’s portfolios here and here.

Sebastian’s home town is Stockholm, where he works as a graphic designer and illustrator. He does a lot of TV channel identities, title sequences, commercials and animated shorts, and you can find his portfolio here. There’s an example of his design work to the left.

“It was quite the challenge being on the road working with limited tools, not to mention the extremely limited Cuban internet connection but I’m very happy with the outcome,” he explains, refering to the illustration he sent us. We think it’s ace. Thanks for joining the project, Sebastian.

The image you see here was something he rustled up earlier for The KDU’s journal which is called Solstice. Pretty cool, huh? You can see a lot more of Alexander’s intricate digital illustrations on his website. We welcome him to the project and thank him for his contribution.

In other news, we just thought we’d let you know that another Memories contributor, Matthew Richardson, has won a rather prestigious illustration competition. The Folio Society invited entrants to design imagery with first prize being a commission to illustrate a new printing of The Outsider by Albert Camus. (You know, the existential novel also called The Stranger, about killing an Arab, which so fascinated The Cure.) It sounds like a dream job for an illustrators and big congratulations go out to Matthew, though I do wish The Folio Society would stop stealing our contributors. You can check out some of the work here.

We discovered Thom via our Open Submissions process via which new and up-and-coming artists, and anyone else who wanted to get involved in Memories, could have a shot at being in the book. We sent Thom the poem Otherside by Joe Kriss, he responded with some great artwork, and when we saw it we were sure we wanted him in Memories.

Thom dropped us a line and it was clear also that he had a passion for working with us. Here’s what he said: “When I discovered the Memories project, I instantly wanted to get involved. My uncle Charlie passed away after suffering with leukaemia when I was very young, but as I got older I was always told how similar I was to him in looks, interests and personality. So I always felt that he was still around, although I wish that I had the chance to actually spend more time with him.”

I think I know what you mean, Thom. My uncle Chris also died of leukaemia and I look a little like him, particularly if I grow a beard.

It’s excellent to have Thom Lambert on board. The image you see here he created as a t-shirt graphic for a record label. He’s inspired by things like vintage graphics, comic books and Saturday morning cartoons, which no doubt you’ll recognise when you check out his portfolio here. Thanks again, Thom.

And we’re really pleased that Bryan did that. His image was chosen to go into the book and we have been able to add another talented person to our roster. Bryan has been a designer for over 10 years and is based in the United States. He does a bit of everything – illustration, branding, interactive, fine art and more. You’ll find there’s wit and charm in his imagery, which is all nicely finished off.

We say: check out Bryan’s portfolio here. And we also say: thanks for joining the project Bryan, it’s great to have you on board.

So we are grateful once again to Taylor Bloxham for being so awesome about this and helping us secure these finishes, which will certainly help make the book an extremely desirable piece of print. People will want to touch it, smell it, read it and keep it.

Now let me tell you about the genesis of the cover. Just like most of the 250 or so covers I’ve worked on during my career in publishing, the process had the requisite amount of twists and turns. It goes right back to the start of the project when we were deciding on the spec for Memories. We thought about newsprint, we thought about a book that comes in a special box, and we talked about different page sizes until the cows not only came home, but got bored and put themselves to bed. At one stage we were going to have a special typographic cover, and you can see an example of this thinking on Rishi’s dream prototype of the book. However in the end we had to rationalise certain things.

One aspect of developing our project that everyone seems to have responded to is the theme image that Luke O’Neill created for us way back at the start. It was on our flyers and posters, and it heads up this blog site. “Who did your image?” and “That’s a really cool graphic.” are comments we’ve heard a lot. So to keep the identity we’ve developed for the project intact, we decided to ask Luke O’Neill to come up with a new and striking image in a similar vein, with more to it. Our original brief to him also asked him to create it using one or more of the Maggie’s brand colours to tie in with the charity we’re donating to.

Luke went away and worked on the image a whole bunch. The first drafts came back and we quickly realised the style just didn’t work with the Maggie’s colours. Overlaid on the greyscale areas of the image it really weakened its impact. Luke also worked on making more areas of solid white and black within the image to help make it a bit starker and more striking on the white cover stock we’ll have, and brought back the spectrum colours we had to begin with. He also applied a few classy bits of line work, which will tie in with the application of the spot UV and foil.

What you see here is a 3D rendering of the book that Antony Kitson has cleverly created. You can get an idea of where the spot UV will be (the word Memories, for instance) but the foil’s a little hard to detect in these mock-ups. So, you’ll have to purchase the book to get the full effect of this print masterpiece.

Big thank-yous go out to everyone who has helped make this cover happen, and to our cover artist Luke O’Neill, who recently took over in the big chair as the art editor of Computer Arts Projects.

The Memories story that Robert illustrated is The Secret We Know by Tom Stables, which tells the story about how Tom and his partner Bei coped when she discovered that she had cancer. Though Robert’s style is abstract, his artwork is a stunning exploration of the worry and grief one experiences in the face of a life-threatening disease. If you click the link above to our Open Submissions story, you’ll see Robert’s final artwork which we’ll also be using as one of our press images to promote the book.

We welcome Robert on board and encourage everyone to check out his portfolio here. And if you happen to be in Manchester anytime between 23 June and 31 July, you can catch Robert’s work in an exhibition in Natuzzi at the Trafford Centre. The show is called Metafizzix.

Based in Baltimore, Match often explores patterns and repetition in his artwork, but is a true multi-disciplinary creative. He does photography and produces music alongside creating images, and also teaches digital media. The work you see here is another charity piece he’s done, for a Japan appeal raising money after the earthquakes there.

Like so many artists we’re working with, Match has seen the lives of those around him touched by cancer in profound ways. Recently one of his students, aged just 15, lost their life to cancer. It’s extremely sad to lose someone so young. Match has also seen his aunt survive cancer and lost his grandfather to the disease.

We send our thanks out to Match Zimmerman for getting involved in Memories, and ask everyone to check out his site. We’re really pleased to have another talented creative on board.