►Alex Varanese - Urban cartography

►Alex Michael Varanese releases music as broken time machines, has released one episode so far of an animated sitcom. He is native to the bay area. Thinks John Hughes is bigger than Jesus. He is an ardent believer in hard determinism and wishes he were better friends with fate; is guilty of an overuse - but never misuse - of the word "literally"; draws upon a limitless supply of cheeky quips designed specifically for ironic, post-hipster posturing; likes red more than you do.

Alex's clients are: Nike, Google, Publicis / Chevrolet, Fortune, Playboy, Island Records, Wired UK, Money Magazine, Surface Magazine, Advanced Photoshop Magazine, Computer Arts Magazine, CBS, Sapient-Nitro / Drambuie, Rowohlt Verlag / Jack Kerouac (view work).

http://www.alexvaranese.com/  

►Santtu Mustonen - Vibrant illustrations

►Works by Santtu Mustonen are illustrations with a bit of movement that make them look 3Dimensional. Santtu is an Amsterdam based graphic designer / illustrator / trippy-gif-maker, has an all new portfolio bursting with strange shapes, wild lines, and funky color combinations that will make you poke your computer’s screen.

http://www.santtumustonen.com/

►Derek Gores - Amazing collages

►Derek Gores, born 1971, New York. Derek has gained national attention for his collage portrait series, recycling magazines, labels, and found materials to create the works on canvas. The series showcases Gores' contrasting interests in the natural beauty of the figure, the angular design aesthetics of fashion (and machinery), and a fearless sense of play.

A successful commercial designer and illustrator for 15 years, clients include ESPN, Lenny Kravitz, Lucasfilm, Kings of Leon, U2, NASCAR, Adidas, Madonna, Harley Davidson, 321 Agency, Van Halen, the National Football League, LiveNation, SEIU, Love Haight Apparel, and JCPenney.

Derek lives and works in Melbourne, Florida, surrounded by the intellect and culture of the Space Coast.

http://www.derekgores.com/

►Vanessa Dakinsky - Anecdotes of everyday life

►Vanessa Dakinsky is an artist based out of France. Dakinsky creates interesting oil on canvas paintings that comes straight out of her unique art world.

"Through painting lens, I explore undefined spaces, mixing realistic elements with dreamy ones. My work comes from combinations, like an echo between anecdotes of everyday life, my obsessive taste for pictures and a more general curiosity for contemporary mythologies and life. Each painting is a living place for contradictory elements. I avoid to simplify or reduce, and prefer opening the enigmae, shady scenes, their reverberations."

 http://www.vanessadakinsky.com/

►Irma Boom - Book design

►Amsterdam-based graphic designer Irma Boom specializes in book making who has different work methods and a different view on things such as the use of unfamiliar materials and formats, colors, structures, and typography. Boom applies the sense of touch into all of her book and has established an international reputation, according to an interview in April 2001.To her, books are seen as objects that communicate ideas and stories and speak to all human senses.

Boom has worked on her 2136 page SHV Think Book as editor and designer for five years. Research for this book took place in cities like Amsterdam, Paris, London, and Vienna. This anniversary book was one of her biggest works and showed a specific view on the history of her company. It was designed to be distributed around the world. However, it's pace of distribution is very slow. Boom has calculated that it will take five hundred years to spread to all the places in the world. Four thousand copies were printed in English and five hundred in Chinese. Her think book has become an international icon of Dutch design.

Her design for ‘Weaving as Metaphor’ by the American artist Sheila Hicks was awarded 'The Most Beautiful Book in the World’ at the Leipzig Book Fair. Her books have been shown at numerous international exhibitions and are also represented in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

This Dutch designer has introduced the idea of a "fat book." When Boom was asked what would make her create a book that was two inches tall and half as thick, she replied: “The book is small because whenever I make a book, I start by making a tiny one. Usually I make five, six or seven for each book, as filters for my ideas and to help me to see the structure clearly. I have hundreds of those small books and am so fond of them. I’ve always wanted to make one for publication, but no one has ever wanted to do it. And I thought, well, this time, I can.” The book contains 704 pages and 450 images. She titles the book "Irma Boom: Biography in Books." The New York Times wrote an article called "A Small Book in a Big Career," published on August 8, 2010, based on Irma Boom. This book only ran for about two months at the University of Amsterdam Library. It was bound in a bright red cover with the word "BOOM" printed on the front in clumsy white letters.

Graphic designer Irma Boom has made over 250 books, 50 of which are in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Boom, at age 49, has designed most of her books for other people the way she has wanted and felt like they should be. Almost none of her clients have complained. A book designer normally works with texts and images selected by editors and art directors. However, Boom combines the three roles by deciding on the book's structure and choosing the themes and visual material on her own. When working on a book, she obsesses over every element. This includes not only how the book will look, but how it will feel and smell and invents ingenious ways of achieving her desired affects. This is what makes her such a great designer.

Boom designed a book titled "Beautiful Ugly" by Sarah Nuttall. Nuttall states that "the book was designed in Amsterdam by Irma Boom, and I thank her for her extraordinary eye and prodigious talent for making books beautiful."The cover to this book was an olive-green color with no pictures or text. It was simple yet elegant, just like Irma herself.

 http://www.irmaboom.nl/

 

►Julian De Narvaez - Mistique illustrations

►Julian De Narvaez was born in Bogota, Colombia, in 1977 and graduated as a graphic designer at the Jorge Tadeo Lozano University in 2002, and in web development in 2004 at the same university. He attended National Art Institute IUNA, Buenos Aires, Argentina in 2009 for specializing in media and technologies program for artistic production. Julian De Narvaez’s work has appeared in various media channels in Colombia and Mexico since 2002.

He currently works with different editorial and design agencies in England, United States and South America.

►Valentina Brostean - Wonderful grotesqueries

►Born on October 24th,1983, in the town Novi Sad, Serbia. Valentina's interest in art began at an early age. Her entire childhood was spent drawing, illustrating and painting. After finishing elementary school and high school for design she continued her education on faculty for applied arts 'Academy of Art Novi Sad" on section graphic design and from year 2008 she is a student on Master studies on same faculty with a major in "book graphic and illustration".

Heavily inspired by urban culture and the pop surrealism movement, Valentina Brostean has developed a unique and very personal style.She has an eye for the strange beauty in the grotesqueries of life. Inspired by the relationship between dreams, natural world and the emptiness of consumer culture, she creates and brings unique characters to life from her imaginary world.

Her body of work is built of melancholy interaction between man-made status symbols and frozen moments of the utopian childhood memories. Strongly focused on figurative narration her characters simply reflect us – modern society without its masks, without the fake presentations that make us acceptable to whatever group we are a part of.

Artist's statement:
"I have always had an eye for the strange beauty in the grotesqueries of life; This appreciation is now very evident in work that I am making. Inspired by the relationship between dreams, natural world and the emptiness of consumer culture, between safe childhood playing to everyday marks of reality I bring and create a new type of creatures in my imaginary world. It is a whole range of characters from the ones in darker corners of the streets of soulless cities to the safe and pure creatures from imagination in my wonderland trying through them to prove that I have never grown up, or at least have never lost touch with my innocent childhood self.

My body of work is built of this melancholy interaction between man-made status symbols and frozen moments of the utopian childhood memories. In my work I often flirt with different typefaces, superimposing pieces of print on top of my illustrations, or using them as part of the drawings. I often use draws in black ink on top of these collages, using all kind of hand written scribbles often, which pull the focus of the work back from the adult world to the realms of childhood. This experimenting with more text and new techniques led me to emerging of very personal style.

The characters i paint may seem like some creatures from another dimension, real but unreal, sometimes very closely connected with childhood, playful and inventive, sometimes abandoned and tragically sad and full of misery. But i think they are simply us, modern society without it’s masks, without the fake presentations that make us acceptable to whatever group we are a part of. Yet the only place where we are truly revealed the way we really are is one from the inside. We all share feelings of fear and loneliness. We all sometimes feel ugly and insecure.

If you examine my work closely, you might come to the realization that my creatures are really kind of self portraits, set in a fantastical landscapes of imaginary world which echoes of her own… a bitter, yet sweetly coated prescription for modern life."

Valentina has been invited to participate in collaborative art projects all around the world in diverse solo and group gallery shows. She has more than ten years of experience with several agencies doing illustration projects, print and educational work. She is now working as independent artist focusing on her personal expression through painting and collaborating with talented people on various projects – anything where she can apply her creativity. Her work has been featured in numerous magazines for visual culture.