Viva Brighton Issue #57 November 2017

NEIL WEBB
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an image, the way he puts the shapes
together, that’s what I find really beautiful
about his work.
“As a subject it’s fairly rare to have
someone come along and ask you to do
a ‘noir’ illustration. The majority of my
work is editorial stuff for magazines,
often quite dry financial publications
and trade magazines, but trying – as is
an illustrator’s fate – to take mundane
subjects and try and make them exciting.”
Last year, however, Neil received a
commission that was just about as noir as
you can get.
“I was contacted by a designer called Jim
Sutherland [from Studio Sutherl&] who
asked if I wanted to design a set of official
Post Office stamps to mark one hundred
years since Agatha Christie wrote her
first novel. And I said ‘yeah, I’d love to!’”
There are six stamps in the set, each
representing a different one of her books.
“We jointly came up with the ideas, trying
to identify a turning point in each novel
where the plot twists, and capturing that.
I’d seen all the films when I was a kid so
I was familiar with the iconography, the
way people dressed.” Some of the stamps
even have an added twist: “One of the
designs is animated, so if you download
an app and you look at the stamp through
your phone it turns into a theatre space
and the characters move. Some of the
others are printed with heat-sensitive
inks; on one image the killer is behind the
curtain, and if you put your thumb on it
he appears!” See these and more of Neil’s
work at neilwebb.net. Rebecca Cunningham
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