Russ Mills

Russ Mills is a UK illustrator whose work is an excited mixture of detailed illustration and expressive splashes & throwings of ink. His scenes are often made up of the faces of animal and human, using elements of nature and limited, subdued, colour palettes to compose his illustrations. Absolutely gorgeous work and a folio that gets better and better — it’s a great one to start from the oldest and move to the newest, so you can see his evolution of skills. You can pick up some prints of his work at more than reasonable prices too.

Danny Allison

Using photos as a base from which to work, Danny Allison works them to a point where they look at home next to the textured colours and scribbles of his work. His compositions of high-contrast photos, simple shapes and complex textures are brought together to provide strong illustrations that blur the line between art hand-made and composed digitally. His use of colour is also gorgeous — the detailed photography element of his pieces are often grayscale, but the textured, simple, backgrounds and shapes are vibrant and strong.

Alberto Cerriteno

Alberto hails from the United States but was born in Mexico. With hints of his heritage present in the style of his illustrations, Alberto uses elegant floral patterns and juxtaposes them with simply-shaped characters. His fun, layered work is intriguing to say the least. His characters often have exaggerated features here and there — maybe an overly large nose accompanied by beady eyes, or a mouth so large that an elephantine toothbrush would be needed to give them a clean and are so damn cute that you’d love to pick them up and cuddle them to bits.

Emmanuel Polanco

I first stumbled over the work of Emmanuel Polanco when I saw his stunning Edgar Alan Poe series on ffffound — a series of works that months later, still get my blood pumping. In the meantime, I�ve been a happy subscriber to his blog and have enjoyed the new work he gives us on a regular basis.

His work is elegant in its execution in that it is often simple backgrounds on which a collage sits upon, a collage reminiscent, to me, of the work of Eduardo Recife of MisprintedType. Grab yourself a cup of coffee, put on some Bob Dylan and enjoy the work of Mr Polanco.

Quotes on Design

via Swissmiss, this is exactly what it sounds like — quotes relating to design. Some are funny, some are great, some are stupid — a good way to waste a bit of time and say “YEAH! I CONCUR, SIR!” a lot.

Styles, Weights, Widths; It’s All in The (Type) Family

An article from the always fantastic Font Feed on the differences between styles, weights and widths.

In Praise of Lo-Fi

Jack Cheng ponders the virtues of living in a lo-fi world.

A quick apology

In the last week or so I played around with the RSS feed in an attempt to enable full article feeds, rather than just partials. As some, or most, or all of you might have noticed, a number of older posts were republished for some reason, resulting in duplicate entries. For some reason it doesn’t appear in the Feedburner feed, just in Google Reader (as far as I know).

If you were one of those who were bugged by this little pain in the ass, then I apologise. I’m hoping to shuffle over to WordPress (currently running Joomla) in the near future, something I’ve been thinking about for far too long without any action, so I’ll be enabling full feeds then!