SPEED-DESIGNER-DATING - Blog Marry Avoi

This was actually quite fun and interesting. We basically did speed dating, but rather than talk about ourselves we tried to sell our designers. The male, female and design group choices we made. You can see my post about choosing said designers earlier on in this blog.

We took notes on the designer name, referrer's name, whether we intend to look into them and general notes on the designer. Here is how it went...

The artists I was most interested by and want to look into further have a * next to their name in the table, these are; Sean Freeman, 50 and 50 and Jessica Hische.

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Sean Freeman

http://www.thereis.co.uk/

Sean Freeman is an illustrator, designer based in London. I quite like his work because he really seems into type, but he manipulates it in quite a creative way. All his work is quite dark and brooding, often quite a darkly lit work with extensive use of black and white, showing quite dark stuff like skulls and whatnot. Then again he has a whole new side to him, like the This Is England poster he did which I really like. All of his work seems to want to say something and capture some kind of message which is why I like his work, it's all quite strong visually and quite vivid. He's got a really good mix, or a more hands on approach, digital type, digital illustration. He shows a really good set of skills technically too, some of his work looks really technically adept.

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50 & 50 (Dan Cassaro)

http://statemottosproject.com/

"50 AND 50 IS A CURATED PROJECT WHICH ATTEMPTS TO CONSTRUCT A HANDSOME NEW WAY OF LOOKING AT OUR COUNTRY. FIFTY DESIGNERS, ONE PER STATE, HAVE ILLUSTRATED THEIR STATE MOTTO, CREATING SOMETHING STEEPED IN HISTORY BUT COMPLETELY MODERN AND UNIQUE: A KIND OF DESIGNER'S ATLAS."

 Fifty and Fifty was created by Dan Cassaro, a designer and animator living and working in Brooklyn, New York. More of his work can be seen at YoungJerks.com "

I really just like the idea, 50 designers and 50 states. Each one is really appealing visually and says something, it takes a quote and visualises it into something interesting, I like this aspect of design. Also the colour palette is very consistent throughout and they all take quite a quirky illustrative route, but it's grounded in nice graphic design too with nice use of colours and type. I like the consistent, yet variety of the combination of red/blue/white/black.

Really like the colours. Aesthetically it's a style I really enjoy and want to identify myself with moving forward. It's big on colours complimenting each other well. Has a hand drawn feel to it with the type, frame and format.. it's one of the big reasons I enjoy it and will look into Dan Cassaro further. I really like how it looks digital and finished but at the same time has a hand-drawn, almost sketchy feel to it with the shadows and shading. I'm definitely going to keep this in mind, it's a style that is really cool.

Jessica Hische

http://jessicahische.is/awesome/

Jessica Hische is a typography/illustrator/designer working currently in Brooklyn, NY. Her work's really quirky and quite personal, her personality shines through her work, which is why I like it. Without knowing the artist you can find out a thing or two about her just through her work, with the amount of design and illustration in the world at the moment and the faceless nature of it, some personality shining through and your own 'style' is a good thing in my book. Even her website name makes you smile, says alot about her. I like the way she presents herself, this is really important in our line of work so I'll definitely remember this when needed. She seems to like her solid block colours, especially reds. I love reds! She's got a really nice bloody studio by the looks of it too [/jealousy]

In her spare time she likes to make websites and generally just help out people and help out budding designers.

http://www.dontfeartheinternet.com/ > really good website to help you get over crapping yourself when thinking about making a website for yourself.

http://icanhazartschool.com/ > her college work is shockingly good. (sighs)

All throughout looking at this work, I've always thought "I could have made this?" "Why doesn't my work look as good as this?" I think the answer to that is, these guys' work in some cases in technical skills isn't that much higher than mine, but the difference is the overall aesthetic, the colours, everything seems to stem from loads of research and genuinely being informed and living and breathing the subject. It's also idea led, they probably had a very good idea how they wanted it to look before they even stepped near a computer.


It always suits the purpose and audience PERFECTLY, that's the difference between their work and my work. It all looks very illustrative, I think with me, once I go on the computer I lose that creative illustrative side, one experiment could be to try and work on paper more until I exhaust that process and THEN go onto the computer. Research can never be enough and I think I could do this more too and just keep trying and trying. Being a designer isn't easy but I'm pretty sure I love it.

Thanks for reading,

Abbas