His clients include Google, Samsung, Uniqlo, Target, MoMA, Airbnb, Netflix, The New Yorker and The New York Times; and with more than 159k followers on Instagram – he’s a force to be reckoned with.

But whether it’s a large-scale public mural on the streets of NYC, a marker scrawling on a Uniqlo t-shirt, a web-based social experiment that documents his life, or writing personal stories on Instagram, Goodman wants to start dialogues about difficult topics such as love, heartbreak, politics, race, therapy and mental health. He believes the greatest joy as a designer and an artist is the ability to connect to another human emotionally through his work and words. A worthy cause, if any.

“I just want to create art that people can connect to,” he told Eye on Design. “I think so much of the time we make art for ourselves or for other people in our communities to see. With so many of the stories I’m trying to tell, I’m trying to make things for actual people. I think sharing your personal stories is sort of activism; when you connect to other lonely people in the world, I think there’s a service involved that is really powerful. I want to continue to use my work as a vehicle for that.”

According to Goodman, the key to good design is emotion. “If I can’t connect to someone seeing my work on an emotional level, then I don’t know why I’m doing it,” he stresses. “How do you interact with a great film or a great book or a great album? You’re connecting with it emotionally. So why wouldn’t I make my work in the face of that? I don’t know why we define graphic designers in such a small box. I just don’t know what the point of that is. There are so many ways for people to interact with one’s work.”

Follow his Instagram page for your daily fix of inspiration.

The post Timothy Goodman Covers the World in Raw Emotion appeared first on PlayJunkie.

Since earning a Bachelors degree in Fine Arts from the University of Michigan School of Art & Design, she has exhibited her work at and painted her murals in Detroit, New York, Chicago, Canada, and France.

But finding her voice as an artist wasn’t easy at first. “I was struggling for a while right after college with anxiety and spread myself thin working on a lot of freelance projects I didn’t love just to make ends meet, so I reluctantly accepted a full-time position at an advertising agency,” she shared with the Shinola blog. “I loved learning about advertising, but also found my passion pulling me in a different direction. That experience taught me how to find humor even in intense workplace environments and gave me the self-discipline to structure my time more effectively.”

Now she’s committed fully to being an artist, exploring different mediums, while also working as a freelance painter. Take a look at some of her vibrant works of art in the gallery below.

The post Ellen Rutt’s Abstract Art Elevates Its Surroundings appeared first on PlayJunkie.

“I’m not much of a self-promoter,” admitted the artist in an interview with Lecture in Progress. “The large-scale nature of my work has helped in this respect, as it’s like a giant advert for me in a way. Instagram is also helpful, although I have, at times, a tortured relationship with it.”

“I work from my studio above Ridley Road Market in Dalston,” she added. “Every day looks different depending on what projects I’ve got on. There’s always a lot of admin and answering emails – that doesn’t change. Sometimes I’ll be planning a mural, sometimes reading and writing as research, sometimes contacting suppliers, sometimes I’ll be outdoors painting a mural, sometimes prepping boards to paint. It’s very varied. I also often travel internationally to paint murals, or to exhibit work abroad.”

Follow her Instagram page for your daily dose of vibrant inspiration.

The post Lakwena Maciver’s Colorful Murals Carry Inspiring Messages appeared first on PlayJunkie.

The Kazakhstan-born, Vancouver-raised painter blends together animals, people, architecture, and nature, creating rich paintings that tell the story of her background.

“Growing up in Kazakhstan at my grandparents’ farm, my grandparents would put on records and we would just listen to folktale stories,” said
Volo in an interview with CBC. “I spent a lot of time kind of getting swept away into a different world.”

“The bigger the wall, the more of a voice it has,” she added. “It is an imagined world that I create of Russian and Kazakh and Polish stories, and the minute I started doing the artwork on walls it became larger than me.”

Check out some of her larger than life creations in the gallery below.

The post Ola Volo’s Murals Are Larger Than Life appeared first on PlayJunkie.

But Martinez didn’t always paint for a living. According to him, he originally went to University to study Spanish Literature. “In my third year of school I took a painting class and enjoyed it so much I decided to drop everything else,” he explained. “I dropped out of school and spent the next couple years building up a portfolio to go into art school. I moved to San Francisco in 1996 to go to the San Francisco Art Institute.”

“The streets of San Francisco were a perfect place for me to get started on my career because I could tap right into my own artistic cultural heritage, while tapping into the newer forms of street painting that were and are still going on,” he added.

Check out some of his larger than life creations.

The post Jet Martinez’s Murals Brighten Up the Landscape appeared first on PlayJunkie.

His clients include Google, Samsung, Uniqlo, Target, MoMA, Airbnb, Netflix, The New Yorker and The New York Times; and with more than 159k followers on Instagram – he’s a force to be reckoned with.

But whether it’s a large-scale public mural on the streets of NYC, a marker scrawling on a Uniqlo t-shirt, a web-based social experiment that documents his life, or writing personal stories on Instagram, Goodman wants to start dialogues about difficult topics such as love, heartbreak, politics, race, therapy and mental health. He believes the greatest joy as a designer and an artist is the ability to connect to another human emotionally through his work and words. A worthy cause, if any.

“I just want to create art that people can connect to,” he told Eye on Design. “I think so much of the time we make art for ourselves or for other people in our communities to see. With so many of the stories I’m trying to tell, I’m trying to make things for actual people. I think sharing your personal stories is sort of activism; when you connect to other lonely people in the world, I think there’s a service involved that is really powerful. I want to continue to use my work as a vehicle for that.”

According to Goodman, the key to good design is emotion. “If I can’t connect to someone seeing my work on an emotional level, then I don’t know why I’m doing it,” he stresses. “How do you interact with a great film or a great book or a great album? You’re connecting with it emotionally. So why wouldn’t I make my work in the face of that? I don’t know why we define graphic designers in such a small box. I just don’t know what the point of that is. There are so many ways for people to interact with one’s work.”

Follow his Instagram page for your daily fix of inspiration.

The post Timothy Goodman Covers the World in Raw Emotion appeared first on PlayJunkie.

Since earning a Bachelors degree in Fine Arts from the University of Michigan School of Art & Design, she has exhibited her work at and painted her murals in Detroit, New York, Chicago, Canada, and France.

But finding her voice as an artist wasn’t easy at first. “I was struggling for a while right after college with anxiety and spread myself thin working on a lot of freelance projects I didn’t love just to make ends meet, so I reluctantly accepted a full-time position at an advertising agency,” she shared with the Shinola blog. “I loved learning about advertising, but also found my passion pulling me in a different direction. That experience taught me how to find humor even in intense workplace environments and gave me the self-discipline to structure my time more effectively.”

Now she’s committed fully to being an artist, exploring different mediums, while also working as a freelance painter. Take a look at some of her vibrant works of art in the gallery below.

The post Ellen Rutt’s Abstract Art Elevates Its Surroundings appeared first on PlayJunkie.

“I’m not much of a self-promoter,” admitted the artist in an interview with Lecture in Progress. “The large-scale nature of my work has helped in this respect, as it’s like a giant advert for me in a way. Instagram is also helpful, although I have, at times, a tortured relationship with it.”

“I work from my studio above Ridley Road Market in Dalston,” she added. “Every day looks different depending on what projects I’ve got on. There’s always a lot of admin and answering emails – that doesn’t change. Sometimes I’ll be planning a mural, sometimes reading and writing as research, sometimes contacting suppliers, sometimes I’ll be outdoors painting a mural, sometimes prepping boards to paint. It’s very varied. I also often travel internationally to paint murals, or to exhibit work abroad.”

Follow her Instagram page for your daily dose of vibrant inspiration.

The post Lakwena Maciver’s Colorful Murals Carry Inspiring Messages appeared first on PlayJunkie.

The Kazakhstan-born, Vancouver-raised painter blends together animals, people, architecture, and nature, creating rich paintings that tell the story of her background.

“Growing up in Kazakhstan at my grandparents’ farm, my grandparents would put on records and we would just listen to folktale stories,” said
Volo in an interview with CBC. “I spent a lot of time kind of getting swept away into a different world.”

“The bigger the wall, the more of a voice it has,” she added. “It is an imagined world that I create of Russian and Kazakh and Polish stories, and the minute I started doing the artwork on walls it became larger than me.”

Check out some of her larger than life creations in the gallery below.

The post Ola Volo’s Murals Are Larger Than Life appeared first on PlayJunkie.

But Martinez didn’t always paint for a living. According to him, he originally went to University to study Spanish Literature. “In my third year of school I took a painting class and enjoyed it so much I decided to drop everything else,” he explained. “I dropped out of school and spent the next couple years building up a portfolio to go into art school. I moved to San Francisco in 1996 to go to the San Francisco Art Institute.”

“The streets of San Francisco were a perfect place for me to get started on my career because I could tap right into my own artistic cultural heritage, while tapping into the newer forms of street painting that were and are still going on,” he added.

Check out some of his larger than life creations.

The post Jet Martinez’s Murals Brighten Up the Landscape appeared first on PlayJunkie.