When looking into icon design and illustration for one of my modules I looked at the work of Lotta Nieminen. Her studio, based in New York, provides graphic design and illustration, and she has created work for a wide range of companies from Liberty of London, to M&S, Facebook, Google, and Volkswagen.
Her recognisable style is maintained across her portfolio of work, but that doesn’t limit the type of work she produces, as she has created children’s books, calendar design, packaging, maps, and patterns for fabric.
Her aesthetic is bright and playful, using simple geometric shapes to illustrate buildings, people and natural elements. Although simple shapes, when layered on top of each other, they create busy and intricate compositions, each telling their own story relating to the client.
Her illustrations are two dimensional and mainly use flat colours, creating a minimal and contemporary appearance. In some of her work she has used texture to provide additional detail and tone.
The colour palettes she uses vary depending on the project, some focussing on primary colours, others focussing mainly on one bright colour such as orange or green, and others are mainly neutral. This allows her illustrations to be applied to multiple genres while maintaining her unique style.
Although her illustrations stand out the most when researching her work, her studio also provides graphic design such as print and web design, and visual identities. Like her illustrations, her designs have a clean and fresh aesthetic.
I find her work inspirational as it is so distinctive but varied, and every project on her website ties together perfectly. The visual identities particularly interest me as they relate to the group project we have worked on this semester where we created a branded title and colour scheme.
She keeps the identities very simple, leaving lots of space around typographic elements and choosing typefaces which reflect modern and elegant identities. This research will be useful to refer back to in future projects when developing illustrations and branding.
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