Seven design experts reveal their favourite creatives for inspiration
Credit: Anna Mills
Creativity doesn't exist in a vacuum – the best designers and artists are constantly in conversation with the work of their peers, drawing inspiration and pushing boundaries. To celebrate the connected nature of creativity and uncover some new talent worth following, we asked seven designers to share the creative minds that have been inspiring their own approach to creativity lately.
Written by Chelsey Pippin
Anna Mills' hand-drawn designs overflow with personality
Mollie Kendell, a designer at Lantern, has been following Bristol-based graphic designer Anna Mills since her university days.
Kendell told Creative Boom that she "always loved [Mills'] manual approach to design with her hand-drawn illustrations and embroidered letterforms. Her style has a human, hand-drawn quality where each character feels like they have their own personality. Dancing on the line between analogue and digital processes, each piece feels like it hops and dances into place across the screen. She creates fluid letterforms and illustrations, bringing them to life by manually drawing frame by frame to create wiggly, twitchy animations."
Kendell shared how Mills' work has a direct impact on her own, saying Mills inspires her "work more manually, escape the screen and rethink how typography can be imagined to have its own personality and movement."
Recently, Kendell particularly loved Mills' 36 Days of Type designs. "The animation consists of hand-drawn frames brought together to show each letterform morphing and taking a new shape, with a changing personality of each character. Her style is inspired by printed ephemera and letterforms; she takes this photo-copy style into her work. This is brought into the small details of her work with changing dials as the characters move into place."
Credit: Anna Mills. Follow Anna Mills on Instagram