design

ROB ABEYTA JR.

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(1972, US)

Rob Abeyta Jr. is painter, designer and art director living in the harbor area of Los Angeles. Currently, he is working with NIKE as the senior designer on a new line of sneakers & apparel to rollout later this year. In addition, he is a member of SA Studios creative team with Mr. Cartoon and Estevan Oriol. 

His past works have included collaborations with Spike Jonze, French Director and Academy Award Winner Michel Gondry and numerous music packaging designs ranging from the seminal punk band LOS CRUDOS, to The Transplants, to LA hip hop legends MACK 10, Cypress Hill and DJ Quick. 

Other works include the design of numerous skateboards and apparel while working as an Art Director for Fourstar Clothing at the Girl Skateboard Companies. While design and art direction take up his days, the nights are taken up by learning the process of tattooing with Mr. Cartoon.

PEAT WOLLAEGER

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(St. Louis, MO, US)

Peat 'EYEZ' Wollaeger has been drawing and painting ever since he was a kid. He started doing commercial art in the 90’s and continued for almost a decade, creating urban designs for such clients as Coca-Cola, R. J. Reynolds, M&M Mars, Anheuser Busch and some lesser evils. Burned out with the graphic arts scene and not creating any personal art, he started using stencils and spray enamels to reproduce his illustrations, and now it’s his medium of choice. 

Internationally known for his whimsical, raw, and brightly-colored stenciled characters that include, Mr. Teeth, the Dead Fat Comedians, Albino Alley Cat, and the Luchador series, Peat Wollaeger is one hard-working artist. His work can been seen all over the globe. His Luchador room at Hotel Des Arts in San Francisco, his massive wall tribute to Keith Hairing at Art Basel in Miami, the 700,000 aluminum bottles of Mountain Dew with emblazoned with his original design, his recent exhibit in Melbourne, Australia, Peat Wollaeger's art is everywhere. 

Watch this video of 'Opening Eyez on the Street' by TEDx Talks:


MR. JAGO

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(1972, UK)

Duncan Jago is considered a veteran of the urban art and design community. He has been described as a pioneer of the Scrawl Movement. Growing up in the small village of Eye in Suffolk, Jago had an intense interest in graffiti, which led him to study illustration in Bristol.

He graduated from the University Of The West of England in Bristol in 1998. It was there that Jago met Steff Plaetz and Will Barras, which led the way to the start of the now renowned Scrawl Collective agency. Mr. Jago’s skills lie in everything from painting and illustration to creating artwork and designs for some of the biggest international brands.

Watch this interview by BBC Blast:


MIKE GIANT

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(1971, New York, US)

Acclaimed worldwide for his prolific work in graffiti, illustration, design and tattoo, Mike Giant is one of the most complete artists of his generation.

As a child he moved to Albu­querque, New Mex­ico, where he stud­ied archi­tec­ture and later he landed in San Fran­cisco, where he was offered a job as a graphic draw­ing artist at Think Skate­boards. Even when he was very young, he worked as a writer in the world of graf­fiti and skate sub­cul­ture, becom­ing at the end of the nineties a tat­too artist, motor­cy­cle and bike cus­tomizer and, lastly, cre­ative mind of the lifestyle brand REBEL8. 

Mike Giant, who defines him­self as an “old hip­ster”, is known inter­na­tion­ally for the extreme pre­ci­sion and rig­or­ous black and white of his lines, that is affected by the influ­ence of pop­u­lar Mex­i­can art and Japan­ese illus­tra­tion. In his pro­duc­tion, that mixes styles and sym­bols of dif­fer­ent nature, we see a con­ver­gence of reli­gious iconog­ra­phy and death alle­gories, tribal sym­bol­ogy and Bud­dhist doc­trine, let­ter­ing and old school ele­ments, in a con­tin­u­ous inter­sect­ing of sacred and pro­fane, love and death. Seduc­tive pin ups and wink­ing femme fatales, BMX bikes, skulls, snakes and Cal­i­forn­ian urban visions pop­u­late his work, all made with extreme care, regard­less of the sup­port, whether it’s leather, paper, metal or cement. His draw­ings and mul­ti­ples have been shown in numer­ous spaces and gal­leries all over the world, from WDWA Gallery in New York to Mis­an­thropy Gallery in Van­cou­ver, to Magda Danysz Gallery in Paris to Mon­ster Chil­dren Gallery in Aus­tralia. Fur­ther­more, his works have often been used by lifestyle and cloth­ing brands, among which the bike com­pany Cinelli and the brands Tribal Gear and Upper Playground.

Watch this video by LandOfChrome:


MICHAEL SIEBEN

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(Austin, Texas, US)

Michael Sieben is a professional designer and illustrator whose work has been exhibited and reviewed worldwide as well as featured in numerous illustration anthologies. He recently took over the managing editor position at Thrasher Magazine and has a monthly column in Juxtapoz Magazine. He is also a founding member of Okay Mountain Collective in Austin, Texas, as well as the cofounder of Roger Skateboards. He lives and works in Austin, TX with his wife Allison, son River, and daughter Eve.

Watch Michael Sieben's Internet Shack Episode 1 by Volcom:


LISEL ASHLOCK

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(Northern California, US)

After graduating with a BFA from California College of the Arts in 2002, Lisel Jane Ashlock exchanged West for East, moving to Brooklyn, New York where she currently lives and works as an illustrator & designer. 

Painting on birch panel, drawing with pencil and watercolor or working digitally, each project is executed with a sensitivity and celebration of the natural world. When she's not busy on an illustration project, Lisel can be found designing, photographing, styling, hand-crafting and creative directing for Moomah the Magazine. 

Lisel has received several illustration awards and accolades and her work can be seen in various national publications, books & advertising projects. She received her MFA from School of Visual Arts in 2009.

GREG GOSSEL

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(1982, Wisconsin, US)

Greg Gossel has a background in design, his work is an expressive interplay of many diverse words, images, and gestures. Gossel’s multi-layered work illustrates a visual history of change and process that simultaneously features and condemns popular culture. His work has been exhibited throughout the U.S. and abroad, including San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Copenhagen, and London.

His commercial clients include Levi's, Burton Snowboards, Stussy, VICE Magazine, and Interscope Records while his work has been published in The San Francisco Chronicle, Juxtapoz Art & Culture Magazine, Artslant, and ROJO Magazine. Greg currently resides in Minneapolis, MN.

Watch this video about him by MN Original:

FRANKY AGUILAR

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(California, US)

Franky Aguilar was tired of drawing family-friendly cartoons. The young designer, in early 2012, started hanging out at a Starbucks in Walnut Creek, Calif. with his cracked MacBook and a $100 Wacom tablet. He began scribbling fire-spewing cat heads and flying squadrons of fuchsia donuts, odder visions that harkened back to his high school graffiti days.

Aguilar, who had taught himself programing, cobbled his drawings into a photo editing app called Catwang and released it for free in April 2012. A month later the app had more than 130,000 downloads by people pasting his cartoons on photos they would share on Instagram. Aguilar’s crucial next move: giving his doodles a 99-cent price tag. Within two months the app was bringing in $400 a day.

Soon after, Aguilar and street-apparel maker Upper Playground sold rapper Snoop Dogg on an app called Snoopify, which offers packs of cartoon pimp hats and dreadlocks. On a whim Aguilar designed a $99.99 cartoon marijuana joint called the Golden Jay. Incredibly, 1,000 people have since bought it to garnish their Instagram selfies.

Watch App Art with Franky by KQED Art School here:


DORA DRIMALAS

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(Athens, Greece)

Dora Drimalas is a San Francisco based designer and artist. She was born in Athens, Greece, but grew up in Houston, Texas with her large Greek family.

Dora is a formally trained graphic designer who has worked at Nike's Brand Design Group in Portland, Oregon and Tolleson Design in San Francisco, California. She is currently a principal of Hybrid Design in San Francisco, along with her husband Brian Flynn.

She has taught Communication Design and Branding at the California College of Arts and at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. Her work has been nationally recognized by design publications such as Communication Arts, Print and How, as well as several design books. Her artwork has been exhibited in San Francisco, Portland, New York and Malaga, Spain.

DENNIS MCNULTY

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1981. Inauguration and attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan. Worst recession since the 30s. Emergence of AIDS. Launch of MTV, the IBM PC, Tattoo You , and the De Lorean. Keith Haring sprays subways, Guernica returns to Madrid, Ali loses his last bout, Sandra Day O'Connor is the first woman appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court, and Dennis McNulty, age 6, develops an intense fascination with the patterns, palettes, and compositions of the pinup illustrations, car ads, and images of menswear featured in his father's collection of Playboy. 

Twenty-eight years later, McNulty re-engages the colors, shapes, and layouts of early 1980s men's magazine design, zeroing in on the genre's own re-engagement of the pinup icons of the 1940s and 1950s. Mindful of the broader definitions of "pervert" as both noun and verb, McNulty distorts the quasi-underground tradition of pinup art, presenting it not as nostalgia or historical quotation, but as a subjective, personal aesthetic interpretation. The results are provocative, infused with a disquieting sexual force that is by turns amusing and unsettling.

DALEK

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(1968, Connecticut, US)

Dalek is an American artist and designer based in Raleigh, North Carolina. He has published two books featuring his artwork, as well as being included in many other books and magazines.

Merging animation, Japanese pop art, and an urban aesthetic, James Marshall 'Dalek' is best known for his Space Monkey character -a strange, vaguely humanoid mouse that he would depict in an array of bright colors and twisted circumstances, often wielding a butcher’s cleaver. Working under the name Dalek, Marshall expressed his ideas through the Space Monkey character until 2007, when he began working in a purely abstract style. 

He has always been engaged in skateboard and graffiti subcultures, and Marshall cites his two-year assistantship in the studio of controversial Japanese artist Takashi Murakami as a formative experience.


Watch a timelapse video by Hurley here:

ANTHONY YANKOVIC

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(Saint Petersburg, Florida, US)

Illustrator and Graphic Designer, Anthony Yankovic, has 9 years experience specializing in junior’s apparel, editorial illustration, skateboard and snowboard art, and brand development.

He has done Art Direction, Design, and Illustration on a multitude of projects including all aspects of the casual apparel industry, skateboard and snowboard graphics, plus numerous album covers, editorial and packaging illustrations.