Another key point that struck me from the talk with Adrian Johnson was the importance of looking at past practitioners work. I think that, although website sites such as It's Nice That are incredibly useful for finding a wide variety of amazing practitioners and helping to home in on what you want to achieve with your own work I think they often result in a very insular approach to illustration in that you become quite focused on only contemporary illustration/design.
After Adrian Johnson talked about how his hero is Paul Rand it made me realise I needed to start looking more into who or what motivates and informs the contemporary practitioners I'm looking at currently.
Therefore I decided a logical place to start would be with Paul Rand. It is no surprise that Johnson has such an admiration for his work as I can see that it relates to the same minimalist/reductive approach that we are both trying to achieve with in our work. I find it particularly amazing just how timeless his designs seem which in part is due to his background in the modernist design movement yet at the same time I think his work is a lot more playful and risque than that of some of his contemporaries.
Again I think it is the way he is able to subtly communicate his content through the use of a minimal amount of elements executed through a variety of different approaches to create a very striking and unified body of work that I find myself drawn to. As I keep stressing, I think the main things I need to work on are getting the right balance between content and reductive image make as well as creating a sense of unity between the various approaches and processes that I use.
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