10 designers as you've never seen them before
Guest Contribution
We’ve featured a lot of designer interviews over the years on Creative Bloq, view but a lot of the time we end up with very similar photographs. Here’s a designer sitting at his Mac with Illustrator open and a bunch of vinyl toys on his desk! Here’s a designer in her studio, viagra sale with lots of inspiring artwork on display! Here’s a designer leaning against a wall! And here’s Stefan Sagmeister with – put some clothes on, viagra 60mg Stefan; you’ll catch your death!
We fancied seeing something a little different, so we asked a bunch of top creatives to delve into their archives and send us pictures of them as we’ve never seen them before. Here’s what they came up with…
01. Jeffrey Bowman
Designer and illustrator Jeffrey Bowman has always been a devotee of the outdoor lifestyle, and spent 2013 living and working in a log cabin in the Norwegian mountains. “I’m constantly looking for the next peak to climb or the next slope to ride down,” he says. Here, though, we see him in a slightly more relaxed mode, fishing in the Lake District. “That was Buttermere, with High Stile in the background,” he tells us. “Sadly didn’t catch anything though!”
02. Matt H Booth
We featured Matt H Booth in a previous feature on designers and their tattoos; since then he’s acquired some new ink that he’s keen to show off. “I’ve wanted to have my hands inked with something for quite a while now, but what to have on them?” he says. “My arms are almost completely covered now and recent tattoos have harked back to the old school style. So I decided to combine this style with my boys’ names: Oscar and Noah.
“Now I had a style and theme, it was time to decide who to design them. There was only one person I wanted and that was designer, friend and fellow tattoo lover, Ollie Munden. Various emails went back and forth with ideas, colours and so on until we simplified the design to two different swallows with the boys’ names incorporated in a ribbon.
“There was only one person I trusted to tattoo such a visible part of my body and that was Louis Molloy, who has inked the majority of my tattoos over the last 17 years. An hour in the chair and a little pain later, they were done. I just need my hands filling up with some more ink now.”
03. Kerry Hyndman
When she’s not illustrating or creating bespoke maps, Kerry Hyndman loves to grab her snowboard and get to the mountains. This action shot of her catching some sick air was taken a few years ago in Switzerland.
“I was training to get my snowboard instructor qualifications at the time,” explains Hyndman, “and then worked out there doing a bit of teaching afterwards. I try and get out to the mountains as often as I can these days, and still have a pipe dream of moving back out there again…”
04. James Oconnell
Manchester-based designer and illustrator James Oconnell has been working on a new style of late – you can see the results of his experiments on Dribbble – and he’s used it to create this striking self-portrait. “The image represents how busy I am at the moment,” says Oconnell, “Snowed under with work, hence the buzz lines around my head, and a tired crossed eye!
05. Jeremy Kool
3D artist Jeremy Kool, creater of stunning iOS animated adventure The Paper Fox, came up with this gorgeous self-portrait in which he’s turned himself into a Muppet. “I’ve always loved the Muppets,” he tells us. “I was watching an old episode and was inspired to create a CG felt puppet. I created some materials and displacement maps that worked well simulating felt – but the problem was I didn’t know who or what to make. Eventually I decided to make a self-portrait, I think it turned out nicely, but I’m certainly goofier looking in real life.”
Next page: five more candid photos of designers!
06. Aileen Poe
Back in 2009, before she decided to go back to university and study graphic design, Aileen Poe and a friend raised £6,000 for Marie Curie and spent a week camping and trekking the Great Wall of China. “It was one of the best things I’ve ever done, and would love to do something similar again,” she says. “You’re not only doing something for a good cause, but you get to see places you normally never would. A very rewarding experience!”
07. Tove Andersson
“I worked in sales and I was good,” explains Tove Andersson. “It started off selling popcorn to cheerful families at Disneyland Paris. A few years later I had sold everything from jeans to journeys to Amnesty International memberships. I loved the job. But I also loved creating. Whenever I was off work I would spend every second working with photography, illustration or painting. Turn up the volume of the stereo as loud as my neighbours would allow at that time of night and just go with the flow.
“‘The ones of you who don’t want to sell like hell can go hang yourselves.’ It was Monday morning meeting at the media sales company I worked for and the manager was giving his weekly pep talk to the staff. I was barely awake after staying up all night drawing but found sudden clarity as I realised that I had to find a more humane place to work, a cup of coffee, and a way to combine my creativity with my career.”
08. Ben Steers
We gave our creatives a pretty vague brief when we asked for their pictures: showing off a piercing, standing on top of Mt Kilimanjaro, pulling off a mad ollie, shaking hands with Robert de Niro, jumping out of an aeroplane… anything fun and interesting, really. And here’s what Ben Steers came back to us with. “I don’t have anything as crazy as jumping out of a plane,” he explained, “but I do have a rather silly photo of myself in 80s fancy dress in the Austrian Alps. Is that crazy enough?” That’ll do, Ben.
09. Sagmeister and Walsh
We’ve all seen Stefan Sagmeister and Jessica Walsh rocking their birthday suits, right? Oh, go on then (NSFW!). But have you seen their performance in matching 60s-style outfits as they remix Adobe’s logo in a series of retro game shows? Here we have the edited highlights for you; you can watch the entire set of five videos over at Behance.
10. Ben Topliss
We never got any pictures of designers shaking hands with Robert de Niro, but designer and art director Ben Topliss came up with the next best thing: a photo of him with Alan Sugar’s sidekick Nick Hewer, from when he appeared in the final of Young Apprentice.
“For their final task, the remaining competitors found themselves in Manchester needing to create a completely new sports brand from scratch. As it was the final, all the original contestants came back to help and assist those still left in the competition,” Topliss explains. “I was asked to help one of the teams develop and design the core assets for their new brand.
“The whole process of filming took around half a day with all the branding materials created in a 30 minute session, during which I wasn’t allowed to offer any advice or guidance to the team. It was a pretty full-on morning, a great insight into the making of the program, and as a fan it was great to take part.”
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