In order to be a great and creative designer, you need inspiration, and you need to be incredibly literate in the field of design. Art must not be repetitive and overly derivative because it will get us nowhere.

Designers must constantly create something unique that fits somewhere between their own level of design literacy and their audience’s level of design literacy. Knowing how to operate within this range can help you create something your audience will understand, and something that will look fresh at the same time.

Here we will go over some of the most well-known designers and their most iconic and unique designs. Hopefully, if you want to be a great designer, you should go over the lessons they taught us, and you’ll be able to apply those lessons to your work. Here are some inspirational artists that any designer should know about.

 Chip Kidd

Chip Kidd – Jurassic Park Cover

Kidd has collaborated with many creative minds in the past like James Ellroy, Michael Crichton, and Neil Gaiman, and it is his creative design that made him the perfect fit for these writers. His work is still used in one of the biggest ongoing film franchises, Jurassic Park, and it is a poster everyone is familiar with. It is a skeleton of a T-Rex, and it was one of the most recognizable logos of the 90s.

The idea behind it was simple; we use dinosaur bones to recreate how they looked like, so why not use them on the cover. After all, these creators were intimidating, and a T-Rex skeleton is a lot more dreadful than a complete T-Rex, so this design worked out perfect. It is this form of visual language with such high information or idea density that makes Kidd’s designed unique and great.

I love NY

Milton Glaser – I NY

Milton is a creator of numerous iconic and unique designs, I NY, posters for Bob Dylan, the title sequence for the TV series Mad Man and much more. All of his designs are seen everywhere around the world, and they are all timeless. His idea is to impress viewers by bridging the gap between seeing and understanding, and it is why his design is so memorable.


Expressive Typography - popular creative designers

Alan Fletcher – Expressive Typography

Typography design is another really important type of design nowadays, especially for a business that is struggling to establish their brand identity. Alan Fletcher was an absolute master of typography and really set the course for everybody else. Alan used expressive typography, bold colors and powerful visual language in his work, and these elements are crucial for creating memorable fonts.

Also, by using this type of typography in images, you can create a more harmonic and more thought provoking content. So, make sure you examine Alan Fletcher’s work before you start working on the ideas for typography design.

David Carson – Break the Rules

Finally, you need to break some rules of logic and design to make something unique. This does not by any chance mean you should combine random and unrelated elements just to confuse people. Breaking rules are something David Carson uses perfectly. He creates images that are strikingly shredded and in some sense illegible layout designs, which challenges the observer’s brain.

You are constantly trying to piece together what the whole image would look like or how what you see would be possible, which makes his work more memorable. It is not something you see every day – you need to stop, observe and think for a moment and you are struggling to distinguish all of the elements involved.

So, if you want to be a good designer, make sure you go through the works of the artists mentioned above. Of course, there are many more creative and unique designers, and there are modern artists you can follow on Instagram or other social networks and learn from them.

In case you need graphic design services, make sure you judge someone’s portfolio based on this standard. You can find a lot of quality and creative graphic design online, by relying on social networks or freelancing platforms, and by comparing them to these experts, you can see if they are competent enough to meet your demands.

Hopefully, you will find competent graphic design experts and get works that will help you establish a stronger online identity.

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