Steve Bland is a creative retoucher extraordinaire working in the design and advertising industry. In 2011 we created a new identity for him based around a PhotoShop wizard named The Great Blandini.For 2012, his brief was to create a promotional brochure that would show off his magical retouching skills and build on the run away success of his new 'magical' brand identity. The brochure must appeal to his key target audience of graphic designers.

One of the key challenges would be in grabbing the attention of a very visually literate target audience — graphic designers. We also had little money to spend on print production.

The brochure has generated an enormous amount of free publicity for Steve. The brochure 'went viral' and was featured on countless international design blogs, including Creative Review and Form Fifty Five (both major hubs for the design industry). The book has also won numerous creative awards, again increasing awareness of Steve's services.

Traffic to Steve's website increased significantly and has consistently maintained a higher level of visitation since launch.

Steve has also seen a significant increase in new business requests, coming from all over the world.The brochure was also very cost effective to produce, using just 1 colour.

To demonstrate Steve's magical retouching skills we created ‘The Little Book of Photo-shoppe Trickery’. The entire brochure is painstakingly hand drawn, with calligraphy pens and ink - even the body copy! A real labour of love.

The book features Steve's 10 favourite PhotoShop tricks. The tricks have been written in a way so as to sound Victorian-esque. To supplement the tricks we asked Steve to create 3 bespoke retouches for the brochure: sawing the women in half, transforming a man into a lion, and magically multiplying himself.