Miriam Ryan Creations

A friend and I created a fake company called Box It which builds boxes for books as well as wine bottles with beautiful custom designs burned into the wood. We created their logo, stationary set, brochure and website.
I wanted the look to feel natural, sturdy, strong and clean.

A festival poster for gay pride parade in Montreal. It’s bold, colourful, beautiful and unapologetic: a perfect representation of the Pride movement.

I made a menu and a business card for Cream Free Crème: an ice cream parlour dedicated to making creamy dairy-free coconut based delights. I wanted it to be flat, playful, sweet and cute. The colors are playful and the dark background really makes them pop. The script fonts emulate handwriting to convey the classic feel of the flavour categories. I based the cow in the logo on an image I found, but all of the other illustrations are mine.

I made a flat movie poster for the movie The Martian. In order to be representative of the movie, I wanted to make the poster look flat, monotone and devoid of life other than the space suit in the middle of the page which is small compared to the vast landscape behind him to demonstrate Mark Watney’s loneliness in the story.

Because the CBC was a totally new organization with a long name that has the same acronym in English and French, I knew it had to be emphasised. For the illustration part of the logo I drew the roof of one of the buildings they manage using its actual colour. I then placed the typography around it. I used the color from the roof to create contrast between the top and bottom parts of the composition and made the words from the bottom pop.

I interviewed Ryan Worsley and then laid out our conversation as a magazine spread. I wanted it to be bold and have a lot of contrast so it’s mostly black and white. I chose my accent color, the pale and dark blues, from a sample of her work, creating a sense of cohesion.

I started out with 7 ideas for this project. Through many rounds of improvements, I combined elements from different ideas, scrapped others and finally came up with this design which is simple, dynamic, suggests movement, and demonstrates innovation. Because of the way the A is slanted and all the pieces come to a point, it looks like it’s taking off before your eyes.

When I was looking for inspiration to redesign a magazine, I found that a lot of them were very cluttered and tight which I found very unappealing. So when it was my turn I made mine clean, gave the elements lots of breathing room, and focused on creating a sense of cohesion, linking the text to the images and the spread pages together, through the use of accent colours.

When designing my instruction manual, I wanted to keep the reader’s focus on the content, so I tried to make it very simple and clean while also being bold. In the spreads without instructional content, I incorporated cute, simple characters in order to demonstrate what the reader could learn to do by reading the book.