Designer Main Stream

 image taken from guyhepner.com

During last week lecture and quiz, one of the artist/designers that stood out to me the most was Takashi Murakami.  Due to his cartoonish style that he uses which are similar to that of Japanese anime but also using a vast array of flashy, bright colors and use of repetition. Looking at his piece “Killer Pink” which portrays the use of smiling flowers varying and colors/size, the image bothered me for a while because I knew I saw this type of design style in somewhere in our everyday life and that it became iconic in my mind. It wasn’t until I got home to my apartment that I went to my CD collection and picked out my Kanye West Graduation album that the album art cover and the” Killer Pink” style were similar. After researching I was indeed correct in my theory that Murakami did in fact design the album cover.

In looking and reading some of his works I have to say I am pretty impressed at what he has done so far in his career. Just like the story of “Stone Soup” as to the basis of how designers normally work together to create something great, Murakami can be seen in relation to this because of how he worked with such designers to transformer their designs a step further. take for instance Kaye West's iconic bear symbol which are incorporated in some of his music video, Murakami used his design approach in creating the bear which you see in the album "graduation". In addition, he has done many collaborations with popular clothing brands such as Marc Jacob and Louis Vuitton. Below are some of his famous works in which has influenced main stream pop cutlure.

Image taken from deviantart.com