What style to choose??

When I started my research into design & illustration styles I had a vague idea of where I wanted to go with my mural, but kept an open mind. I felt from the start that such things as bright vector designs would suit the likes of Japan more than Berlin, and the artistic fluent sketch styles would look more at home in France or Italy. So despite really liking the styles of Rubens Lp, Pomme Chan, Glauco Diogenes etc I knew they just wouldn't be right for my chosen project. It was the industrial, dark, grunge feel I had in mind, capturing the old berlin with the vibrant new, but I just didn't how to go about creating that.

I came across a Columbian designer/illustrator called Javier Piraguata, and as these examples show above, he uses photography, typography and illustration all together to create a really unique collage style design. The way he layers and positions the images is superb, creating amazing shapes and a powerful end result. He blends colour with black & white, the old with the new and type with imagery in a way that makes so many different elements gel effortlessly into one design.

These are techniques Javier's work that I would love to implement into my own mural design. The colours and typography used here I don't think would work too well, but the way he makes the element work together and the overall feel of his designs are something that I would definitely look to recreate.

Another designer that I have a lot of appreciation for and that I have previously looked at is Josef Muller Brockmann. He was a swiss graphic designer, who's style is far from what I was originally looking for, but it is the way he uses imagery that attracted me to him. The proportions are different, angles obscure and they run off the edge of the page giving the effect that they are really filling the whole design. This shows the importance of the images he chooses and also that the positioning and sizing of images is key to creating a good design.

One more designer who's style caught my attention was Devante Chang. He is a designer from Portland, USA who now lives in Seoul, Korea and he specialises in illustration, print and web design. It was his collage style designs I really like though and they hold aspects of exactly what I was looking for. The layers of textures, imagery, typography and colour, in a similar way to Javier Piraguata , seamlessly blend together and yet always keep the eye busy. I love how you could look at the design again and again and always see something new.

All of these different artists and styles have influences my thought process and how I will go about designing my mural immensely, and have fulfilled exactly what I was looking for before I started my research.