Siobhan Gallagher is a graphic designer and illustrator, and she’s pretty great. I first saw her work on Tumblr, with a set of playing cards. I love the way each card has its own personality, instead of having all the kings, queens, and jacks look the same. The colors are different from card to card, but they fit together like a traditional deck. Instead of black and red, you have warm and cool color schemes, with different patterns combined on the cards. I wish I had thought of these! You can see the rest of them here.
I’m drawn to works that involve a lot of tiny details, and after poking around on her website a little, I found this piece that she did, called The Wicked City. It is stunning. When I look at these, I find myself wondering if I could reproduce these patterns by hand and am suddenly struck by visions of losing my mind with a Sharpie.
How would you describe your work? I like to think of my work as playful, colorful, clean, and well-thought out.
How did you end up pursuing graphic design and illustration professionally? I always loved art when I was younger but what really drove me into graphic design specifically was in high school when I was the yearbook editor. This was when I first used InDesign and Photoshop and really got into it (like, “stay after school to work on it for hours” into it). After high school, I spent a year studying English Literature in Ottawa and realized that was not for me, so I applied to two art schools’ design programs, got into both, and decided to head to NSCAD University to get my Bachelor of Design! I’ve always loved illustration and luckily both design and illustration goes hand-in-hand pretty easily for me and even luckier, people pay me to do so!
On your website, I read that you spent a semester at University of the Arts in Philadelphia. What effect, if any, did that have on your work? Studying at University of the Arts in Philadelphia was an amazing, flew-by-so-quickly experience that has definitely effected how I work now. I was able to take both Graphic Design and Illustration classes. What I loved about the Graphic Design department was how strong their methods of typography instruction were, which helped improve my designs and how I worked. My illustration instructor at UArts helped me in strengthening my technique and in giving my illustrations more depth, which I hope to continue and develop throughout my career.
How do you go about starting a project? Hmm! I guess I start with very basic sketches. In illustration work, I draw an outline of how I want the final piece to look, scan it, bring it into Illustrator and draw over it with the Pen tool, and keep playing around with it until it looks the way I’d hoped. With graphic design projects, a lot of my layout exploration is done digitally rather than in my notebook. In editorial projects, this means a lot of playing around in InDesign, and in poster of book design, this means a lot of experimenting in Illustrator.
What is your workspace like? Honestly, I try to keep my workspace clean. I really try. But it’s always covered with books, prints, cards, calendars, etc. It’s all about managing the madness I guess. I just like surrounding myself with what I love!
What is the most challenging project that you’ve done?I actually just completed it: my school’s graduation catalogue. It’s like the art school equivalent of a yearbook but it consists of the works of everyone who is graduating. I had to design a cover and theme that best represents my school and graduating class, pitch three different concepts to the university president, then establish the cover design, grid, layout, colour palette, and paper stock in a matter of weeks. What was challenging was knowing that what I was designing was going to represent my entire school so it couldn’t just be a great showpiece for myself, it had to be something that everyone would like. I just sent off the final proofs to the printer yesterday so I’m really excited to see the final product printed on the specialty paper I ordered!
What do you think is the biggest influence on your work? Oh, man. I’m not sure who THE biggest influence is, but I’m inspired by Stefan Sagmeister‘s versatility, Jessica Hische‘s drive, the illustrations of Ryan Brinkerhoff‘s, Andrew Kolb, Luke Bott! Ah! There are so, so many, these are the first few off the top of my head.
Here’s a little more of Siobhan’s work. I like how she can do great things with a wide variety of colors, or with a very limited palette.
