emotionslive.com

emotionslive.com homepage

Website design and logo design by Emotionslive.com

Emotionslive is a website designed by and featuring the work of "Mike". The website stuck out at me mainly because of the homepage featured at the top of this page. The colours and gradients and shapes across the page make it stand out a lot more than many wesbites and the smooth, ordered style makes it quite obvious that it is a design wesbite. The website also standsout because it has such a variety of styles and design in the portfolio.

justcreative design

Series of print design by justcreative design

Digital Mash

"Love Problems like Ice Cream" print by Rob Morris

SuperKix brand identity by Rob Morris

Digital Mash version 3.0 homepage by Rob Morris
This website is really intersting and has recieved a lot of positive feedback. It uses flash animation and interactivity to give it character and bring it to life. The head at the top is animated and can be changed to do different different things.

Deeks cafe brand identity by Rob Morris

Rob Morris is a digital designer from Australia. All the work featured in his online portfolio is digital, photography or digital print. He is a well renowned designer and places himself as from the "modernist school of design". He has a simplistic, clean style to his work.
Morris creates a wide variety of work from print to website design but interestingly he has several of his own self-imagined designs with no third party comissioning the design. I like this about the portfolio because it seems more personal and it shows that his passion for graphic design is not based around the money or the fame but rather the actual design. If he was not recieving any work or being paid i'm sure that he would still be designing on his own.

imjustcreative.com

Various logos by imjustcreative.com

imjustcreative is a logo design company that gives brand identity to companies around the world. This is a very different style of graphic design to the designers I have listed so far, but it is a really important one for the graphic design industry. Designing a logo for a company is important because it has to represent the company somehow in what they do or their aims but it also has to be visually appealing and memorable for it to be worth while. The logo has to give a company identity so that you can see it somewhere and know exactly what company it represents and why it is there.
You can see that the logos designed above are neat and well arranged. It is clear that a lot of different parts of the logo have been thought including colour, type, stroke and texture.

Ben Tour

"Cold 2" Ben tour

"Blood 2" Ben Tour

Ben Tour is an illustrator and figurative painter. he uses a variety of applications of paint to create his work, and is most noted for using a large majority of female characters in his paintings. His illustrations of the female form are incredibly anatomically accurate, most especially the facial structure of his subjects. His use of perspective and different angles is really interesting and makes for much more dynamic facial contours than many other artists using human form. The bold use of colour brings the characters to life and expresses a lot of emotion over the ultra realistic shape of the faces.

As far as I can tell, Ben Tour is an artist and illustrator far more than a designer. However, I think that his style gives a really genuinely original feel to his work and could easily stick out in the graphic design industry if given the chance.

Vault 49

Coca-Cola Advert by Vault 49

'Smoke City All Stars : Smoke City Album Covers' by Vault 49

Vault 49 is an internationally renowned graphic design company who produce work for high profile clients around the world. They specialise in a mixture of photography and illustration but are also well known for work with type. I really like their style of design because they can use a really simple looking style that produces a massively complex and detailed result. They also seem to have a really effective understanding of colour in terms of vibrancy and tone to express different meanings and add a strong ambience to the work.

Dave McKean

The Brotherhood - 'Elementalz' CD Cover by Dave McKean

"Cages" Issue #5 by Dave McKean

"Anthropomorphik" Calander by Dave McKean

Dave Mckean is an English illustrator, Comic illustrator, photographer and graphic designer and uses a combination of these in his work. I love the creepy, disturbing style that a lot of his work takes on and the mixture of photo editing and graphic design is quite similar to that of Bill Sienkiewicz.

Bill Sienkiewicz

"Adult Swim" DVD cover Illustrated by Bill Sienkiewicz

Bill Sienkiewicz is an American illustrator most known for his use of drawing, inks, collage and other things that are not often found in comic art and his use of combining several different techniques in one image. I really like this style and it influenced alot of work in my last year of A level Art. The different use of textures and materials in one picture i a really aesthetically pleasing thing to see and it has made Sienkiewicz really well known throughout the world and hlped win him a lot of awards for his illustration.

"Voodo Child: The Legend of Jimi Hendrix" Illustrated by Bill Sienkiewicz. Published by Penguin USA

"Electra: Assassin" Illustrated by Bill Sienkiewicz. Published by Epic Comics, Marvel Comics 1986.

Frank Quitely

"The Sandman: Endless nights" Published by Neil Gaiman and DC Comics 2003. Illustrated by Frank Quitely

Frank Quitely is a comic book and graphic novel illustrator from Scotland. He is a large influence to alot of my illustration work because of the high quality of the illustrating that he does.
The name "Frank Quitely" is a play on the phrase "Quite Frankly" and isn't his real name at all. It was actually a name that he used to stop his family from relating any of his work that they might see with him for fear that they would be offended or disapprove, but the name stuck and he uses it for all his illustrating. He begun his career illustrating for lesser known comics and a couple of self published works but moved on to working for Darkstar and working on things like X-Men and Batman. I've never known Quitely for his work with the comic book heroes style of book because it isn't really something that interests me. Instead, I actually found him through a collaboration with Neil Gaiman in a 'Sandman' story called 'Endless Nights'. I immediately loved his style of illustrating and the way that he lays out each page so interestingly. His attention to detail is really impressive and his characters have a really human character about them which a lot of comic style illustrators fail to achieve. Unlike a lot of comics, his work in this 'Sandman' book didn't have frames to break up different aspects of the page. This creates a really appealing soft gradient between different parts of the page and makes each look more like a work of art than a comic book story.

"Batman & Robin #5" Illustrated by Frank Quitely

Frank Quitely recieves quite alot of unnecessary criticism for his work because of the methods he uses to create his illustrations. Instead of using india ink to outline his pencil drawings like older style comic artists, he uses a computer to scan the image and then gives it the outline style using software like Photoshop.
I don't honestly see why anyone has an issue with this. In my mind it sounds like an easier way to produce the things that he wants to in a primarily digital age.