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Our New Visual Artists competition has quickly grown into one of Print's most anticipated issues every year. In July, we start taking nominations from art directors and designers all over the world, invite the nominees to submit their portfolio by September, and make the selections in October. This year, for the first time, we invited four former winners— Saiman Chow (2002), Rob Giampietro (2004), Joshua Darden (2006), and Julia Hoffmann (2006)—to come to our office and, with the Print design staff, narrow down the 95 nominees to the 20 winners included here.
Our judges showed a predilection for two sometimes contradictory elements of design: illustration and installation. Many of the featured illustrators incorporate textured, craft-based techniques to render good ideas with even better skill, as evident in the deceptively simple images from Jean Jullien, the importance of shadow in the work of Leslie David and Karim Charlebois-Zariffa, the physicality employed by letterpress artisan Mikey Burton, or the pattern “surface library” used by Lotta Nieminen.
Nature actively influences much of the work as well, even if the results vary. Emmanuel Romeuf and the duo Always With Honor draw inspiration from childhoods spent in the mountains, while Sam Weber reimagines the forests of his native Canada. And though none self-identify as type designers, they all nonetheless engage with letters on both a cerebral level—as Jonathan Puckey does in “Typographic Rhythms”—and a visceral one. Oliver Munday’s alphabet of maimed GI Joe soldiers, for example, is a poignant type experiment. Bondé Prang’s collateral for House Industries, meanwhile, features imaginative typographic play.
Installation, or three-dimensional design, asserts itself in both digital and print environments, such as in Aaron Koblin’s information visualizations or Katrin Schacke’s visual metaphors depicting the universe. Taken all together, these designers are showing what they can do when some assembly is required, whether the result is a personal page or a public space.
Learn more about the New Visual Artists competition and see past winners at our competitions page.
This year's winners:
- Always With Honor
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Mikey Burton
- Jonathan Calugi
- Karim
Charlebois-Zariffa
- Frank Chimero
- Leslie David
- Jean Jullien
- Aaron Koblin
- Oliver Munday
- Lotta Nieminen
- OK-RM
- Bondé Prang
- Jonathan Puckey
- Janine Rewell
- Emmanuel Romeuf
- Nikolay Saveliev
- Katrin Schacke
- Sicksystems
- Tomi Um
- Sam Weber
[Ed note: We will be posting a new profile every weekday through March and April, so check back for updates often]
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