I shared an image by Philipp Dorn­bierer on my Tum­blr the other day, and peo­ple really responded to his work. So, more! More below. Mar­vel in the beau­ti­ful shapes, myth­i­cal crea­tures, and smart use of pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive space. All images via his web­site. ...

Dawn Gard­ner, a recent graphic design grad­u­ate, uses dig­i­tal col­lage and a clean use of typog­ra­phy to com­pose images that have sev­eral dichotomies to them. Com­po­si­tions are both struc­tural yet play­ful. They are abstract in their arrange­ment, but com­prised of pho­tographs. There is both focus and diffusion. There is a cer­tain amount of ease with ...

Last week in my posts I explored quite a bit about stroke — fea­tur­ing artists that employed a con­fi­dent and direct stroke that echos through­out their work. Jen­nifer Hen­nesy, a graphic designer and artist has work in the same vein. Her projects, draw­ings, and even type­faces employ a line and shapes that evoke a care­free ...

A few years ago, I tried my hand (lit­er­ally and fig­u­ra­tively) at hand let­ter­ing. My lack of atten­tion to detail was not con­ducive to suc­cess­fully and neatly illus­trat­ing text itself. Kate Prior, how­ever, has it right. Her inven­tive and cre­ative solu­tions to the stan­dard posters and sinage boast the text as a focal point, not ...

Right now, present to me a work that has rounded, amoeba-like shapes, and I’m in love. There is some­thing about them that is a bit car­toon­ish to me, a bit of a blast from the past with my child­hood. Insert­ing them into any project instantly adds a bit of humor and play­ful nature to it. Take ...

Ryan Swan­son is both a col­lage and sculp­ture artist, as well as designer and teacher. His col­lage work (and sub­se­quent sculp­ture) explore the idea of iden­tity and how that is affected by the world that sur­rounds us. A bit of writ­ing on his work (via his website): I con­duct scenes wherein objects and bod­ies relate ...

Tam­syn Mys­tkowski is a designer and illus­tra­tor, a recent grad­u­ate of the Edin­burgh Col­lege of Art. Tamsyn’s empha­sis on is form and the fig­ure. She plays around with the human fig­ure, fus­ing it with the land­scape and abstract­ing it to the point of non-recognition. I love that she is using the neg­a­tive space instead of sim­ply ...

For this addi­tion of Time Travel Tues­day, I’ve selected the work of Alvin Lustig, an Amer­i­can graphic designer who best known for his book cover design. Born in Col­orado, Lustig moved to Los Ange­les as a child and started his design career from there. He believed that you couldn’t teach what pure tal­ent gives you, ...

I am a fan of Ger­ard Armen­gol and his draw­ings, that are strong enough to stand alone but also com­pli­ment the design it often accompanies. The draw­ings pro­duced by the Spanish-based illus­tra­tor are bor­der­ing on the naive style of draw­ing, but I don’t think that is giv­ing them as much credit as they deserve. His ...

Paul Rand’s influ­ence still sur­rounds our cul­ture today, although you might not know it’s him. Rand cre­ated cor­po­rate iden­ti­ties for big name com­pa­nies such as ABC, UPS, and Enron. His logo for Yale was used up until last year, and he was a pro­lific designer. Rand got his start by tak­ing night classes at the ...