In common with World Leaders in Their Underpants, the intention is to humanise people who are otherwise placed on a pedestal, by showing them engaged in mundane pursuits, like doing the housework, or merely practising a hobby that one wouldn’t expect. On the whole, there’s less nudity than in World Leaders, with the exception of John and Yoko, who appear with only a beard, a hat and a pair of glasses between them.

We hope to make the cards available to order online soon.

A full gallery is available on the Peartree Heybridge website.

Mindsport specialises in Positive Psychology publishing, and they commissioned me to create the Pocket Psychologist character, then draw him in several poses and scenarios for use across eight titles, from guides on confidence and achieving goals, to a happy marriage or retirement. The 42 page books are full of colour illustrations of the dinkiest shrink and his perplexing solo misadventures.

The books will soon be available in other territories.

In the UK, there are an estimated 8.7 million people who have never used the internet.

Surfing The 7Cs is a graphic novel published by Sheffield Hallam University and the four South Yorkshire local authorities. Digital inclusion is about finding out who doesn’t have access to the internet and why, then working out what can be done about it. Hannah Goraya and her team spent 2 years researching this for Sheffield Hallam University, and wanted to make sure their conclusions reached the widest possible audience. The graphic novel Surfing The Seven Cs was her solution.

I was hired to help Hannah turn their report into an illustrated guide to best practices for councils tasked with broadening their digital inclusion. This was by no means an easy translation, as graphic novels thrive on thrilling set-pieces at their most vivid, or poignant character studies at their most thoughtful. Digital inclusion reports, on the other hand, consist of lots of hard work and research and very little that obviously lends itself to the stuff of compelling narrative. It was never going to be Watchmen or Maus, but it did succeed in communicating a series of important messages in a way that would otherwise have been dry and inaccessible.

Internet access is something most of us take for granted, but if this report helps people who are ordinarily unable to benefit from being online, then I’m extremely happy to have taken part in getting this research to a wider public.

The graphic novel will be distributed to local authorities and is available as a pdf here.

The portraits were commissioned in the irkafirka style, in recognition of all the work we’ve done with Nokia in the past. In-keeping with that project, they were drawn quite spontaneously in a flurry of scribbling. However, the first drafts contained a little too-much of the artist and not enough of charming, positive, approachable, and easy-going elements that make up the Nokia brand. In fact, they looked positively devilish. However, I hope you’ll agree, I’ve revised their mischievous, possibly even sinister, eyes without losing the irkafirka freshness.

You can see the full portraits in the gallery below, or on the Nokia Connects website.

These latter illustrations were doubtless greeted with the same bemusement we used to encounter when providing a similar service for the Nokia Conversations blog. Users would arrive looking for information about new handsets and be greeted by excruciatingly literal visualisations of comments that had been left on the site. If you’d like us to bemuse your employees in a similar fashion, get in touch to discuss the services irkafirka can provide.

Meanwhile on Twitter, irkafirka managed to amuse rather than bemuse, and recipients responded with the surprise and delight associated with our regular service. Highlights below.

The resource will be available for use in schools soon. Tom’s website is under construction, but you can contact me for more information in the mean time.

There are plans to further develop the brand, so more monsters if and when they hatch.

The Firkempole is my entry, beleaguered as it is by tweeters and their senseless droppings. A totem is an emblem that symbolises one’s ancestry, supposedly with the power to watch-over or assist you in your tribulations. However, the indigenous people of North West America also erected shame poles, designed to ridicule dishonourable types.

If my totem leans towards anything, and it almost certainly leans if the shelving in my house is anything to go by, then it’s a shame pole, erected for the approbation of scoundrels everywhere.

Take part in Colour me Totem.

The irkafirka pencil crayons were gainfully used to provide 2D animation for this collaboration between recruitment advertising agency, ThirtyThree, digital production agency, Pixillion and directing duo, Scubaboy. They needed an animator/illustrator who could help them bring to life the National Trust strategy document, Going Local.

This document is designed to help their 5000 staff and 60,000 volunteers raise awareness of their properties and engage local communities. For their 2011 conference they wanted a 90 second film that told this story; detailing where they want to be by 2020 and why ‘going local’ is so important.

How was this achieved? By getting me to doodle all over the strategy document itself.  By getting Scubaboy to bring those doodles into the third dimension with an ingenious blend of classic stop motion and digital compositing. For me, it was a rare opportunity to dust down the old school wooden light box and engage in some vintage frame by frame animation. Flash played its part too, but discretely. Nobody need know.

The film won a RAD award for Employee Communications.

Stills from the film below.

Nokiafirka is the first commercial spin-off from irkafirka.

The Finnish multinational corporation asked us how we could apply our apparently memetic doodling to their Nokia Conversations blog. We responded with caution, aware we were in danger of transgressing irkafirka rule 6, “If we stop enjoying it, we’ll stop.”

For this reason we decided to take the irkafirka model and create a separate channel, providing content that would be recognisable to our fans on Twitter, but for Nokia’s niche, but by no means small, audience.

The writers of The Official Nokia Blog wanted to give something back to their readers, and to create a little buzz, we launched with a flurry of doodles based on what people were saying during the mobile giant’s annual event, Nokia World. We intend to continue from there with weekly updates based on comments on their blog. We only hope that the readers will get wind of our activities and infuse their tech-talk with references to pelicans, greenfly and other such nonsense.

Here are some of the highlights from Nokia World: