4 minute read
Design Heroes
from Branding.
I am attracted to Olly Moss’ work due to his ability to combine image, colour and negative space together in a way that communicates the themes and narrative details of the subject he is portraying.
Moss’ projects often relate to pop culture, video game art, poster prints for movies including Harry Potter and Star Wars as well as book covers.
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His design philosophy of using layers of bold strong coloured silhouettes that are built from flat strong shapes with abstracted smaller details generates an immersive illusion of depth within his work from layers of 2D silhouettes. What I find fascinating about his work is the level of detail in the imagery such as capturing the scene of Mowgli talking to Kaa the snake within the tigers stripes.
Olly Moss
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Olly Moss’ designed posters for ‘The Jungle Book’ and the game ‘Firewatch’
I want to pitch you the weird thing. I will send you a sketch that will take me eight hours to think of and five minutes to do. - Olly Moss
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Noma Bars use of negative space in his work is exceptional as his pieces usually consist of no more than three colours. Two colours to define the positive and negative space generating imagery within both spaces that interact with one another while the third colour is bright and bold used to emphasise detail. His use of negative space communicates meaning without the need for type.
Noma Bar is an Israel-born graphic designer, illustrator and artist currently working in the UK.
I especially love his piece ‘Which Came First’ where he graphically posses the age old question ‘which came first, the chicken or the egg?’ using the contours and curves of the question mark as the chickens head with the dot as the egg.
Noma Bar
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Negative space work by Noma Bar
When it comes to my art work I would say that I am a perfectionist, although my sketchbook, and my process, is a mess. -Noma Bar
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Looking at Paula’s work you can see that every element has been carefully and deliberately placed to both capture the essence of the subject the graphic is of as well as clearly communicating the intended meaning to the viewer through her use of type.
She has been working as a partner at Pentagon in New York since 1991. I especially love her streamlining of ‘The Public Theater’ branding by giving it a single iconic and accessible identity through clever use of typography altering the width of the letters in ‘public’.
It is this idea of identity and meaning behind type beyond the written words which fascinates me about Scher’s work as type communicates feelings.
Paula Scher
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Cover of book for Paula Scher’s maps project along with ‘The Public Theater’ logo which Paula re branded
It’s through mistakes that you actually can grow. You have to get bad in order to get good. -Paula Scher
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Ji Lee’s project ‘Word As Image’ where he explores and creates calligrams to capture the meaning of various words as an image utilising only the typographic elements of the word to display this meaning.
His work reminds me of onomatopoeia but with sight rather than sound is the meaning portrayed, some of his transformations are elegantly simple such as rotating ‘ill’ 90° clockwise revealing a figure laying down on a bed recovering from being ‘ill’ and extending the ends of the ‘c’ to enclose ‘condom’.
It is inspiring as his work made me have a greater appreciation of how kerning, scaling, positioning and orientation of type can enhance the texts meaning.
Ji Lee
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Selection of images from Ji Lee’s ‘word as image’ project
When you give something, just for the joy of creating, it always comes back on a much larger scale. -Ji Lee
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When I first stumbled across Eiko’s work I admired his patience, craftsmanship and level of detail he has with a craft knife to create these paper layered silhouettes where every layer communicates a different colour.
However, I then discovered him to be a master of deception and illusion...
Eiko Ojala’s work doesn’t consist of layered paper but instead of digital illustrations with nearly every shadow and highlight being digitally rendered along with the incorporation of photographic elements.
This discovery about Eiko’s work greatly intrigues me how you can recreate physical media on a digital platform.
Eiko Ojala
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Computer illustrated designs made to look like paper cut art by Eiko Ojala
