Kate Moross

Editorial Illustration for The Ride Journal

I discovered Kate Moross about two years ago, and I thought that I would be fun to introduce her for my first blog post. Moross is a London based designer, illustrator and art director. When it comes to typography illustration, she’s a real pro! They are often very chaotic, but that’s what makes her style so interesting. I think it works very well in terms of catching people’s attention. They not only have vibrant colors, but the way the composition is made with support of certain object forms, lines, etc… it all just  pretty much screams out at you in an effective way. 

So in the example to the left, you can see there are tons of different typography illustrations that were used for each word of the sentences, and they’re all unique in their own way. They are either tall, short, cursive-like, all caps, all lower case letters and so on. Yet, even if it seems overwhelming you get a sense of balance here by how compact they all are and how they fit next to each other. Plus, each word is characteristically done to represent itself, so for example ‘rain’ has a few emphasized lines around the letters that look like rain drops, and it's in blue color which represents the water substance.

In 2012, Moross became the director of her very own Studio, called Studio Moross. It mostly deals with music based projects, but if you want to check it out there some cool designs; in the packaging tab you can find some neat CD covers. There are more of her personal works (mostly typographic illustrations) on her own website, Kate Moross.

Kate Moross Olympic Shoe for Adidas Consortium 2012

You can start to tell, after seeing a couple of her works, that she has a kind of style that sometimes repeat, such as the kind of lines she uses (squiggly, zigzag, vertical or horizontal, straight lines) as well as shapes; she’s very into 3-sided or triangular shapes. She has done many cover designs and illustrations for well known brands and products, such as Converse and Adidas. In fact, some of her typography and illustrations have been incorporated into the products themselves.  

On top of that, she’s also designed for charitable nonprofit organizations like the American Cancer Society. I think that she’s really pushed herself up the ladder of success at quite a young age (26 I think) and she serves as a great inspiration not only me, but to many other aspiring designers... and  hopefully you guys too. If you want to buy a T-Shirt, necklace or any other products with her designs on it, you can check out her webpage’s Shop. Hope you liked it!

2D or not 2D Animation Festival

I found out about a film festival that is held in Seattle Washington every year.  It's called 2D or not 2D and it was originally created to try and promote more traditional 2d animation.  They have people come in and talk about different animation techniques, and show the various finalists that have been submitted over the previous year.

They don't exclude any computer animated films.  In fact, they embrace all types of animation, but they want to do it in a way that makes traditional animation still viable.

Problem is, it's hard to find out that much information about them.  They have promotional videos they do for each year, and they have their website at 2D or not 2D but it's really lacking in information.  Especially about the finalists themselves.

Regardless of the difficulty tracking down the animations, I really like the idea behind this animation festival, and I hope it continues to grow through the years.

Hand Drawn Type (and why it needs publicity)

   I've always been infinitely jealous of people who have this talent. To be able to render words with the clarity of a machine is a skill that I don't think is nearly publicized enough. When we are younger, good penmanship is always stressed but never for the right reasons. We have to lean cursive and honestly, how useful was it? Compare that to this for just a second and think, "That looks way cooler and could definitely be useful to me now." Hand typography and calligraphy are like lost arts in today's society and that just bothers me. I wish there was a class somewhere in this school where we could learn how to do this because it just blows me away with the level of detail. I'm assuming the key to it comes from lots and lots of practice along with having reasonable artistic skills.
   There are scores upon scores of blogs and such on Tumblr that can give you more examples of beautiful work like this. We as the next generation of designers should try and spread awareness of just how awesome this skill is and try to do it ourselves. Before this class I had no idea how much effort was put into the creation of words and letters. People outside of our field find this science and craft typically boring or confusing so it should become part of our responsibility to show just how awesome and important all of this is. If everyone in the world had just a little bit of this skill, we will have drastically reduced the number of chicken-scratch writers out there, myself included.