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Altai Healing
“I love your website, it’s just perfect, words, imagery, info etc. You really have reached out creating a feeling of warmth and genuine connection. Mark has done you proud with his photos and his design, he’s brilliant! It is all so you! The images of the horse touched me in a deep and emotional way. Wonderful website, congratulations. You do your equine healing with people! I feel this very strongly around you – a healing centre!”
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Matt Biggs, gardening writer and broadcaster
“Mark’s portfolio shows his skill and versatility. He has clear vision and a great sense of humour– essential qualities when working to deadlines. I have worked with him on three books now, all of which have benefitted hugely from this exceptional talent. I highly recommend both the man and his work.” -
Which? Gardening, trials
It’s the background I wish to draw your attention to; it was dredged up in a pond in a medieval manor house in Kent during the drought of 2021. I cleaned it up and slowly dried it out for a couple of years before it saw the light of day again last year. This beautiful medieval oak door is one of my favourite backgrounds. This picture was one in a series of articles I was commissioned to photograph for Which? Gardening last year. -
Virgin Classics
Commissioned by Jeremy Hall, Mark Winwood designed over 75 record covers for Virgin Classics, and was one of the leading lights involved in the 'design revolution' that was redefining classical record sleeves during that time. This was picked up by Creative Review who wrote the article 'Music's Little Gems' in the early nineties which heavily included Mark's work. It was an excellent opportunity to explore old and forgotten typefaces and pen Elizabethan calligraphy for various projects as and when it was needed. He also worked for EMI and Decca. -
BBC/ The High Street
“I’ve worked with Mark on many assignments over the years and he always delivers excellent results. Quercus commissioned Mark to shoot stills for BBC Series HIGH STREET – he had to deal with five TV crews simultaneously, each day, covering several shops with different lighting levels indoors and out. And this over several days each week for six very busy weeks. All this while keeping a low profile as filming progressed. Needless to say, he delivered excellent photos and got on really well with the producers, film crews and the actors. Great work Mark!” -
Which? Gardening
Mark has worked for Which? Gardening for the past fourteen years, under three publishers and five art directors. Noted mainly for his work on the ‘Action Now’ series, he is a regular contributor to the magazine. His work features of range of areas: from people and their gardens, step-by-step, plant portraits and product shots. One of his most successful series he did for Which? Gardening was a year long study of a young family and their allotment plot. -
RHS A–Z of Plants
“To each project he does for us, Mark always brings tremendous passion and energy. A mammoth project such as the RHS A–Z of Garden Plants requires an immense amount of organisational skill to plan and shoot the 5,000 images at their optimum time. The 120 days commission was shot over a period of 18 months. Mark took some wonderful images for this title and was always enthused and dedicated to this project. It was a joy to work with him and his lovely images looked fabulous in the book!” -
The Covid Years
“Mark helped us through the process of re-branding and redesigning our company logo and also the look/feel of our marketing and print advertising materials. He was very quick to come up with some excellent options, very reactive to our requests for any adjustments and most importantly he really tuned in to what we needed as film/TV special effects company – he really understood where we were coming from. The end result is a totally refreshed and rejuvenated logo which along with the new advertising has impressed and delighted clients and company directors alike” -
Flowers in Rye
Here are a range of Christmas wreaths designed by the wonderfully talented Alex Ball. Alex dries all her own plants, and uses locally sourced lichen, pheasant feathers, and a manner of materials found in hedgerows and grown in her extensive garden that overlooks the Tillingham River, in East Sussex. Alex’s wedding bouquets and wedding arrangements are her main creative work but these dried flower arrangements are noteworthy in their own right. -
Women’s Institute
It was a widely publicised fact that The WI celebrated their 100th Anniversary last year and as part of their celebrations one of their groups approached Mark Winwood to chronicle the year of the life of their village. Published in February 2016, it follows along the lines of a scrapbook that Wi groups made in 1965 to celebrate their fiftieth anniversary. Although he has moved out of the area of book design a long time ago, he did this special one-off commission for them, as well as writing and illustrating cartoons styled on The Daily Telegraph’s ‘Matt’, that feature throughout the book. -
The Potato Shop
Initially asked to take a series of gorgeous pictures of their potatoes for advertising purposes, he came up with an idea for their website and was commissioned to design it in the very first meeting! Since he didn’t know anything about web design he designed the look and put the layout into the hands of a web designer to put together. These are Mark’s original layouts. He now either codes the sites himself or, on the more complex designs, he has a few seasoned coders who have the ability to take his designs and implement them exactly to his specifications. -
Recent books, photography
“Mark has taken photographs for many of our lifestyle books over the years. He is talented, hardworking, great to work with, and takes gorgeous pictures. Even on days in the garden where we had wind and rain, he somehow manages to make all the pictures look sunny. Brilliant!” -
Books, design
Mark designed book covers for most of the top publishers in the UK during the mid 80s and 90s, including Penguin, Virago, Heinemann, Hamish Hamilton and Verso amongst many many others. The combination of winning a D&AD Award and commissioning illustrators brought him under the radar of The Association of Illustrators, where he sat as a judge of their review panel for 1989. He went on to design fully illustrated books for several years, where he commissioned photographers, illustrations and book designers. He worked for a variety of imprints and publishing houses during that time. -
Altai Healing
“I love your website, it’s just perfect, words, imagery, info etc. You really have reached out creating a feeling of warmth and genuine connection. Mark has done you proud with his photos and his design, he’s brilliant! It is all so you! The images of the horse touched me in a deep and emotional way. Wonderful website, congratulations. You do your equine healing with people! I feel this very strongly around you – a healing centre!” -
RHS Great British Village Show
Dorling Kindersley’s flagship gardening book for 2017 was photographed by Mark Winwood all around the UK in 2016. The brief was to capture all the cultural diversities running throughout the country ranging from local village fetes through to the largest shows the RHS exhibit. This book has received a huge amount of in-store publicity and re-established the working collaboration between Mark and Matthew Biggs, the last book they had worked on together was for Kyle Cathie’s Gardener’s Question Time. Another book is being planned for the coming year. -
Magazine articles
In a world that is constantly demanding something new, Mark has successfully worked for a variety of magazines over the past sixteen years. For the excellent, and sadly short lived magazine Garden Life, he was commissioned for the pilot issue and went on to be commissioned every single month for the magazine over its two year lifespan. Other clients have included Gardens Illustrated, BBC Gardener’s World, Sainsbury’s Magazine, Gardens Monthly, Beautiful Britain, and The National Trust Magazine. Mark was also a regular for the cover story for the weekend Telegraph Gardening section over a two or three year period. -
Art on Instagram
At the beginning of January 2024 I joined Rye Art Centre to become a portrait painter…in my spare time, but first things first: Life class. On my Instagram pages I chart the ups and downs, ideas and inspirations that may help others try and give it a go to paint themselves. At the moment I’m using the Zorn palette. Four colours: Yellow Ochre, Ivory Black, Cadmium Red and Titanium white. I’m not concerned that I’m a novice…Actually the final piece didn’t matter what mattered most was the enjoyment of simply doing, it was the journey of it all that I found so thrilling. Addictive.
