Artist Spotlight: Mark Gowing

I ran across Australian graphic gesigner Mark Gowing's work through Grain Edit, and while I can't necessarily recommend all his topics, I really love his work and his creative, modern style. His work is just so good (which means this post could be a little long).

Mark's Eddie typeface is very cool. Lots of typefaces have circular look to them, but this is probably the most circle-centric typeface I've seen. It may not be the most readable for long portions of text, but it's wonderfully artistic and well-designed.

The way the type is used on this poster is quite good. The type really creates its own pattern.

A similar typographic style is seen on the Their Land poster from an Australian poster anthology. I like the way the circular type looks in such a bold variation.

I'm also loving Mark's CD packaging for various projects. Each one is simple, modern, and striking. This set of packaging for Preservation Music is very cool. I love the minimal style mixed with the artistic photographs.

I like the way the packaging for the Circa 2011 albums have an intriguing style even though they're remarkably simple in color scheme.

I think that's a big part of what good design is: not quantity of elements but quality. It's not about how much image you can pack onto a page, but what significance and power the image has.

This Post Music packaging is so fun. I love the bright colors and the way the poster folds out. I like the simple yellow triangle on the CD face.

The poster has really great overlapping colors. And the gray band above makes great use of minimal typography and really makes the colorful poster-cover the central feature.

I also really like the identity for 38 South. It's a company that works with vinyl records, so the image of a vinyl record is appropriate. I think it's cool that not the whole record is showing. Again, the circle typography is excellent.

I love the contrast between black and white in the print materials. Lots of dark gray and black in the photos mixed with white space on the stationery is really cool.

Mark Gowing also has some excellent posters. This one for Revolver is so fun and yellow! I love the sans serif type and the creative way it's spaced out.

The extra white yellow space in the poster is really good, too, and I like the varying sizes in type.

These posters for Digital Press are very good, too. This one reminds me of Piet Mondrian in the color scheme and style (although Mondrian did not use gray or any shapes besides squares and rectangles). I'm not sure if that was an intentional art history reference or not, but it sure looks cool.

This one is also very striking, I think mostly because of the strong, bold colors. I also think the way the Digital Press logo is subtle in both posters, but in this one especially. I think that's an interesting advertising technique: someone thinks, "oh that's a cool image. What's this ad for?"

So that's a snapshot of Mark Gowing's work for you. His design is a recent favorite of mine, and I'd love to hear what you think of his work!

link: mark gowing