Noma Bar (born in 1973) is an Israel-born graphic designer, illustrator and artist. His work has appeared in many media publications including: Time Out London, BBC, Random House, The Observer, The Economist and Wallpaper*. Bar has illustrated over one hundred magazine covers, published over 550 illustrations and released three books of his work: Guess Who – The Many Faces of Noma Bar in 2008, Negative Space in 2009 and Bittersweet 2017, a 680 page 5 volume monograph produced in a Limited Edition of 1000 published by Thames & Hudson.

Noma Bar is a highly prolific artist whose graphic works are celebrated for their impact and simplicity. Each of his ideas are first drawn in a sketchbook and then transferred to the screen where he works on them digitally to come up with the final conceptualised solution.

 The dual strategies of his practice are efficiency and humour, and these come from a deep understanding of how the brain percieves and understands imagery.

With a limited pallet he subtlety and precisely manipulates shape and form where familiar symbols and pictograms evolve to form new meaning. Negative and positive spaces tessellate creating several images in one, and sometimes a few moments are needed to see the embedded, often poignant, message.

I enjoy Noma Bar’s work because unlike a lot of other illustrators, his works makes the viewer think. And when you realize what a piece is really about, it gives you a kind of satisfaction – as if you’ve just solved a rebus. His work is also very appealing visually because of clean shapes and limited colours.

Sources

https://www.dutchuncle.co.uk/noma-bar

http://www.eyestorm.com/Pages/Browse.aspx/Artist/Noma_Bar/49

60 Brilliant Negative Space Illustrations By Noma Bar

Franklin Christenson “Chris” Ware is an American cartoonist known for his Acme Novelty Library series and the graphic novels Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth and Building Stories. His works explore themes of social isolation, emotional torment and depression. He tends to use a vivid color palette and realistic, meticulous detail.

Chris Ware was born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1967. Known for his New Yorkermagazine covers, he’s hailed as a master of the comic art form. Ware’s complex graphic novels tell stories about people in suburban Midwestern neighborhoods, poignantly reflecting on the role memory plays in constructing identity.

Although his precise, geometrical layouts may appear to some to be computer-generated, Ware works almost exclusively with manual drawing tools such as paper and ink, rulers and T-squares. He does, however, sometimes use photocopies and transparencies, and he employs a computer to color his strips.

The organizing principle of “Building Stories” is architecture, and — even more than he usually does — Ware renders places and events alike as architectural diagrams. He’s certain of every detail of these rooms, and tends to splay their furnishings out diagonally to show how they fit together.

Ware’s daughter Clara was born in 2005. “It changed my life,” he says. “It gave my life a middle point that it hadn’t had before. Now everything is either before her or after her.”

Chip Kidd saw the difference. “I think the major thing that has changed him—and this is a large part of what ‘Building Stories’ is about—is having a child. From what I’ve seen, it really seemed to ground him. He’s a great dad, and a work-at-home dad, and I think it really did help him get a better view of the world, and of life. There’s just a lot less of the despair.”

Sources

https://www.1843magazine.com/content/features/simon-willis/chris-ware

https://www.drawnandquarterly.com/author/chris-ware

https://art21.org/artist/chris-ware/

http://www.barclayagency.com/site/speaker/chris-ware

Vivienne Flesher creates a brilliant array of multi-textural illustrations and artwork, fusing a classic approach to technique and materials with a smart, modern visual sensibility. She is a frequent contributor to magazines and newspapers, especially The New York Times, and has illustrated an extraordinary series of book covers, many of them featuring powerful and graceful portraits. Flesher works is a wide variety of styles, using charcoal, inks, paint, and collage. In addition to her elegant illustration work, Flesher has created an eye-popping collection of psychedelic personal art that is astonishing in its layered graphics sophistication.

“I’d always appreciated the psychedelic-inspired photos Richard Avedon took of the Beatles, and they became the inspiration for some work I did combining my photography and the computer. I sent samples to three art directors I thought might use them, but only one responded: Kelly Doe of The New York Times. She was working on a personal project—a show mounted by the Japanese government. Kelly has often given me the chance to do experimental projects. She can see where I might take something even though I have little in my portfolio to prove it.”

Vivienne does not believe in “staying current”. In on of her interviews she said that trying to stay current seems futile, like having plastic surgery to stay young—it never looks natural. We can’t help but be products of our time. 

She uses a lot of vibrant colours in her work which is what attracts me the most. Although the works might seem like ordinary psychedelic posters, to me, they look way more clean and organized than the ones from the 60s. It might be because Flesher has access to current technology, but it also takes good sense of space and tension to create beautiful pieces like these.

Sources

https://www.ai-ap.com/publications/article/14852/illustrator-profile-vivienne-flesher-my-influe.html

http://vivienne-flesher.squarespace.com/

http://zeitgeist-art.com/vivienne-flesher

George Hardie (born 1944) is an English graphic designer, illustrator and educator, best known for his work producing cover art for the albums of rock musicians and bands with the British art design group Hipgnosis.

Hardie was trained at St Martin’s and the Royal College of Art and worked as a designer/illustrator for more than 40 years, making illustrations for clients around the world. He was the cover artist behind Led Zeppelin’s debut album Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon.

Over the years Hipgnosis produced artwork for some of the most influential bands of the era including Led Zeppelin, Genesis, and Black Sabbath, but it was the bold graphic design for The Dark Side of the Moon which thrust the studio’s work into the public eye when it hit record stores in March 1973.

In the process of creating the album cover, the breakthrough moment was provided by Storm Thorgerson(member of Hipgnosis) who remembered an illustration from a photography book showing the process of light refraction through a glass prism; “An inspirational image in itself” as Hardie recalls. The concept seemed particularly fitting for Pink Floyd who were famous for their use of light shows.

He also created ‘Day’ and ‘night’ sticker inserts for Pink Floyd’s 1973 album Dark Side of the Moon, combining Hardie’s typography with a reworking of the album’s prism / pyramid theme.

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Overall, I love George Hardie’s style because of how different he is from most artists of his time. His colour schemes and use of lines are very appealing to me.

Sources

https://www.westminsterinternationalshop.com/blogs/news-1/pink-floyds-the-dark-side-of-the-moon-the-story-behind-the-design

http://www.eyemagazine.com/feature/article/the-rules-of-the-game-extract

https://www.stormstudiosdesign.com/

Victor Moscoso is a classically trained artist who applied an academic perspective to the psychedelic era. He studied at Yale with Joseph Albers whose theories on the use of color were a major influence in Moscoso’s later work.

Most of his works have very vibrant colours and almost illegible “psychedelic” type. He seems to have thought of type as a design element, not just a way of communicating words.

The vibrant colours and symmetrical lines create a pattern which creates an optical illusion of depth and movement. “The Miller Blues Band” is one of my personal favourites because of how well Moscoso managed to interpret the type and the figure into one beautiful piece.

Another thing that I love about his style is the way he uses photography in his works. Given Moscoso’s artistic sophistication, it is not surprising that he was the first of the rock poster artists to use photographic collage.

Sources

http://www.artnet.com/artists/victor-moscoso/

https://www.moma.org/artists/4117?=undefined&page=1&direction=

www.victormoscoso.com/

Maxwell Coburn Whitmore, better known as Coby Whitmore, was an American illustrator known for his Saturday Evening Post covers, and commercial artist whose work included advertisements for Gallo Wine and other national brands. He additionally became known as a race-car designer.

Born in Dayton, Ohio, he studied at the Dayton Art Institute and honed his skills as an apprentice to illustrator Haddon Sundblom in Chicago before joining the Charles E. Cooper Studio in New York. Soon after, a steady stream of assignments for Ladies’ Home Journal, McCall’s, Redbook, Cosmopolitan, and other women’s magazines brought him public acclaim.

Sophisticated, with imaginative compositions, brilliant use of color, superb draftsmanship, and good taste, his pictures represented the “Good Life” in the post-war U.S. They are nearly all most notable for their glamorous women–the ideal of American youth, sophistication and beauty. 

The ladies are feisty, independent, know their own minds…the product of the new found weath and leisure of America in the 1950s and 60s.

Sources

https://www.illustrationhistory.org/artists/coby-whitmore

https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2015/07/coby-whitmore/

Coby Whitmore: Artist and Illustrator—Standard Edition

Martin Ritchie Sharp was an Australian artist, cartoonist, songwriter and film-maker. Sharp made contributions to Australian and international culture from the early 1960s, and was called Australia’s foremost pop artist.

His psychedelic posters of Bob Dylan, Donovan and others, rank as classics of the genre. In his most popular designs, the artist embedded letters, photographs, and bizarre cartoon figures into psychedelic patterns.

He studied at the National Art School in East Sydney. There, he co-produced a satirical broadsheet, The Arty Wild Oat. Through that project he met Richard Walsh, editor of the University of Sydney’s campus newspaper Honi Soit, and Richard Neville, who edited the University of NSW’s Tharunka.

The three of them soon set up a studio in a former horse stable in The Rocks where they created OZ magazine. It turned undergraduate humour into colourful, biting satire that critiqued conservative society. Sharp’s humorous, often lewd graphic style, was combined with an insistence that the best quality paper was used.

They went on a hippie trip to Asia and decided to go to London right after. Once there they decided London could do with its own version of OZ magazine. It quickly became a counterculture magazine of artistic and political renown. By issue No.3 Martin Sharp’s art direction went psychedelic, selling up to 100,000 copies. OZ London became a graphic design landmark, lasting 48 issues from 1967 to 1973. It was also the subject of the longest obscenity trial in British history.

In 2005 Sharp received an Order of Australia (AM) in recognition of service to the arts as a painter and graphic designer, particularly contributing to the POP art movement in Australia and providing support to emerging young artists. In 2012 he received an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Visual Arts from the University of Sydney and in 2013 he received a Fellowship from the National Art School.

Sources

https://www.agda.com.au/inspiration/hall-of-fame/martin-sharp/

http://www.artnet.com/artists/martin-sharp/

https://www.martin-sharp.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Sharp

Stevan Dohanos was an artist and illustrator of the social realism school, best known for his Saturday Evening Post covers, and responsible for several of the Don’t Talk set of World War II propaganda posters. He named Grant Wood and Edward Hopper as the greatest influences on his painting.

He was in demand both for advertising and illustration assignments, and he was also commissioned to paint murals in public buildings in West Virginia, West Palm Beach, and St. Thomas, Virgin Islands. He was determined to try for the coveted job of creating covers for The Saturday Evening Post, and in 1943 he succeeded.

Dohanos was known for taking infinite pains in creating his illustrations. Often they reflected back to people and places from his childhood or incidents he observed in the countryside. Whatever scenes they represented, his paintings were illuminated by his kind humor and his passionate love for the American scene.

In addition to his more famous works, Dohanos oversaw the design of more than 300 commemorative postage stamps, including a 1959 stamp honouring the tenth anniversary of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

Sources

https://www.illustrationhistory.org

https://connecticuthistory.org

http://artinstamps.blogspot.com/2015/11/stevan-dohanos-1st-part-19591970.html

Born in Brooklyn in 1914, Rand was creative from a young age. He studied art at Pratt Institute in Manhattan and practiced drawing constantly. One of his first jobs was laying out product spreads for Apparel Arts, a popular men’s fashion magazine owned by Esquire. 

Soon after that he started doing magazine covers. His work was instantly noticed. By his early 20s, Rand was considered one of the most important designers of his generation.

In 1941, at the age of 27, Rand was named chief art director of the newly-formed ad agency William H. Weintraub & Co. American advertising at the time had changed little since the late 19th Century, especially in terms of how the ads were conceived.

“Before Paul Rand, the copywriter was the lead,” says Donald Albrecht, the curator of the new exhibition. The copywriter would supply the words—often times a great many of them—and the words would dictate the layout of the ad, often drawn from one of several templates or formats.

Inspired by the bold graphic work being done in Europe, Rand brought a radically different approach to the job. As he saw it, an ad’s effectiveness lay in the way words and images were combined on the page. “Rand’s ads have words and pictures, but they’re all fused into one symbol,” Albrecht says. 

Rand introduced a crucial new ingredient into commercial art: form. By paring down copy and breathing white space into his compositions, Rand made his advertisements stand out from the dense copy surrounding them.

Sources

https://www.wired.com/2015/04/paul-rand-visionary-showed-us-design-matters/

https://www.tdc.org/news/paul-rand-exhibition-tour/

https://www.vintag.es/2012/05/vintage-advertisements-from-1940s.html