The Jacky Winter Group

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The Jacky Winter Group
An ongoing collaboration

In 2007 my friend Jeremy started an agency for Australian illustrators called The Jacky Winter Group.

I've been working with him ever since on print advertising, branding and promotions.

It took me a while to realise this is called 'copywriting.'

2007 Jacky Winter Field Guide
The first Field Guide we made was a riff on the Jacky Winter, a small Australian robin and the namesake of the company. We based it on a guide I found in a thrift store. I imagined each artist as a bird and wrote up a guide to spotting htem in the wild.

2008 Creative Review Handbook

Jeremy wanted to put an ad in the Creative Review Handbook, but was concerned an image might be swallowed amongst all the other images. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so I went ahead and wrote a thousand words.

Oh, hello there. Why don’t you stop flipping through and hang out this page for a while? What’s going on here? Well, not too long ago we were taken out for a really fancy lunch. The food was just great, which is a big deal because we don’t normally take much time for lunch during the day, we’re just too busy taking obsessive care to ensure our clients have the best, smoothest commissioning experienced possible. That might also explain our inappropriate clothing choices that day. In case you were wondering, don’t wear jeans and a t-shirt to lunch at a restaurant where they serve foams. We were so impressed that we decided to go ahead and buy our first-ever sourcebook page, and isn’t it lovely? So we bought this page, and went back to the office to stroke our full bellies contentedly, and we began talking about what to do. What a difficult task. We represent 32 of Australia’s most talented, hardworking, nice-smelling contemporary illustrators. We whipped out our pocket calculators and iPhones and figured out how much space that would give each artist. It worked out to just 4 square centimetres. Do you know how big 4 square centimetres is? Four square centimetres is slightly larger than a postage stamp, but smaller than a box of matches. It’s an awkward size, and it certainly wouldn’t do the fine artists of The Jacky Winter Group any justice. We then discussed commissioning Annie Liebowitz to do a portrait of Jeremy Wortsman, our principal, looking thoughtful and rugged, but apparently he’d turned down her advances in the past and he didn’t want to rub salt in old wounds. Then, thinking back to our wild and creative university days, we realised we could fit exactly 1,000 words into this space, no more, no less. Someone piped up to say a picture is worth a thousand words, but that’s just plain corny. Either way, we rolled up our sleeves and got to work. We understand that when flipping through a book like this, full of so much promising work, things can get a bit mushy. Visual overload, if you will. Besides, there’s so much more we could talk about here. Sure Kat Macleod’s lovely collage ladies will make you want to get a new and better haircut, but did you know that when she was at Central St Martins Kate Banazi wrote ‘I love you’ with chalk over and over again on the insides of men’s jackets before they were lined? Or that Paul Oslo-Davis dreams of being better at ping-pong? Or that Karl Kwasny is suspicious of cane toads, large groups of people, and large groups of cane toads? Our artists are as fascinating and complex as you, which is why you’ll have such a great time working with them. Commissioning an illustration is a marvellous thing, watching something unique and organic come to life, and we at The Jacky Winter Group are passionate about our trade. Just ask those who’ve been cornered by us at parties. Hold on, we haven’t properly introduced ourselves, have we? Sometimes we get ahead of ourselves. For starters, The Jacky Winter Group is an agency for Australian illustrators. We’re pretty strict about the ‘Australian’ part, as we believe Australia is a big, interesting, pleasantly strange and often overlooked place, and we want to do our best to at least correct the latter. As mentioned, we presently represent 32 of Australian illustration’s finest men and women. Some of them have rather bizarre names, but we assure you they are real. We are bright, energetic and new, at only 18 months young, more or less. The Jacky Winter Group is helmed by a Mr Jeremy Wortsman, a designer and art director by trade and native New Yorker. Mr Wortsman succumbed to the charms of Melbourne city, including the quaint public transport system, attractive townsfolk and fox-faced bats, in 2001 and hasn’t looked back. After he spent a few years enjoying the bats and trams Mr Wortsman came to realise that, despite their considerable talents, many Australian artists struggled to make an impact overseas. So, with his experience, skills and networking prowess he came to their aid by forming the Jacky Winter Group. You’re probably thinking this is all very nice, but Australia is so far away, so very, very far away. It’s so far away that it was the place where England sent all the people it never wanted to see again. It’s so far away that not even the laws of nature could reach it, and duck and beaver made wanton, miscegenating love and produced the platypus. Don’t be concerned. If you go to our website, www.jackywinter.com, you’ll find that we more than likely have a contact number in your country. You’ll also more than likely see an artist’s work that makes your toes curl with delight. So if you find your toes curling and your interest piqued, please go ahead and give us a call or send us an email. The resilient tubes and pulleys of the Internet reach far, and won’t break if you get in touch. What’s more happily answer calls any time, day or night. Go ahead, try us, see how warm and reassuring our phone manner is, how varied and interesting out accents. Furthermore, we don’t just represent great illustrators. If you visit our website you’ll see we also make the best promos known to man, a dizzying array of books, card games, and ornithological research journals, which you’ll get to see for yourself if you commission through us. We use sophisticated online project management software that makes commissioning and communication amongst many parties a breeze, and we always deliver on time. If you catch us on a good day we can also provide reliable advice on your love life, when we’re not attending to the colony of hyperintelligent, transcontinental, super-stinging bees we use to deal with outstanding invoices. Are you really still reading this? Haven’t you been to the website yet? Go on, have a look, you’ll like us, we promise.

2010 - Rattlesnake Egg
We rebranded rattlesnake eggs, envelopes containing a rubber band and washer that rattles when opened, as promos to send to new and existing clients.