Chris Ware

Chris Ware is a notable American comic book artist who is perhaps well know for his affiliation with the ACME Novelty Library cartoon company as well as his own series of graphic novels. Interestingly, Ware is not your typical cartoonist in the sense that his subject matter is quite dark and covers matters including mental health and negative elements within today's society.

An example of Ware's precise work, which
graced the cover of The New Yorker.

Resembling work that would have been popular and 'current' at the start of the 20th Century, Ware's designs comprise of meticulous detail (for both typography and general illustration) and influential components from the 'Rag Time era' such as classic cut out toy designs, music sheet designs and classic newspaper cartoonist-style illustrations.

All of Ware's precise and immaculately drafted work is done by hand with ink, although sometimes appearing to be at first glance digitally created. Using a range of geometric tools such as T-squares and rulers, Chris only uses digital elements into his work for the purpose of adding colour, nothing else whatsoever.

I'm a huge fan of Chris Ware's work, finding his attention to detail and meticulousness absolutely out of this world. The way in which he crafts an image or design is an art form in itself, with an unimaginable amount of time consuming geometric-based formatting involved. I myself can never see myself working in such a close-knit way due to being quite an "urgent" person, however I have total respect for artists and designers, like Ware, who do.

Image Source

April Greiman

Designer April Greiman, head of Made in Space (Los Angeles based design consultancy) is acclaimed for being a part of a collaboration who were given the honour of being named the "establishers" of the New Wave style of design that swept America during the 1970's and 1980's.

For over the last 30 years Gremain has proved to be an inspirational force in her specialist field of transmedia projects and film installation. Considered an artistic explorer, known to delve deep into themes of colour, text and imagery, April has found a good balance in incorporating the two seperate mediums of art and technology (including beautiful technology) into one.

"Hand Holding Bowl of Rice" - Koreatown, Los Angeles

An element that has played a big part of her career is public art installations, perhaps one of the most prominent being "Sears Great Indoors", a 60 feet long geometric concrete design with embedded accents of stainless steel. Also, "Hand Holding Bowl of Rice", an 82000 square feet design covering two walls which features an oil painted translation of a video still of literally a hand holding a bowl of rice. This piece was inspired by the tale of an Indian Goddess' gesture of rice as a sign of abundance as well as Gremain's own fascination with the fact that a single grain of rice has one of the most complex DNA's of any species.

Image Source

Peter Saville

Peter Saville rose to prominence in the 1980's for his record sleeve designs for the company "Factory Records" where he created advertising for heavily successful artists/bands of the era including New Order, Joy Division, Roxy Music and Wham!.

Above is a collection of some of Saville's world famous sleeves (Including Peter Gabriel, Pulp and Ultravox).

As a huge fan of music, especially music from the 1980's, I have come across Peter Saville's work many times. What I love most about Saville's work is that there is no particular "style" to it and that each album art is different, for example from the above images it is hard to believe that they are all created by the same designer (from the simple photography of one to the heavily designed and complex approach of another). There seems to be little consistency and correlation of any kind between each of his work which I find very interesting as it's almost like the "identity" is focused on the band for which he is designing rather than himself/his designs.

Images courtesy of Wikipedia.