Nick La is a freelance illustrator, CSS web designer, and designer of stock icons. He is the founder of N.Design Studio (where he designs and codes everything himself), Web Designer Wall, Design Jobs on the Wall, Best Web Gallery, and Icondock (a new site exclusively showcasing icons). He prefers to work in vector due to its “scalability and fine stroke” and his preferred tools are Adobe suite’s Photoshop, Illustrator, and Dreamweaver. In fact, his favorite tool in Illustrator is using the Eyedropper and Graphic Styles to apply fill and stroke to many objects at once. While he claims that he likes to explore different aspects of art and culture to see how he can adapt them to his design, his background is Chinese, he likes Chinese and Japanese work, and a lot of his illustration work includes oriental elements.
Looking at his work, I wouldn’t say that Nick La’s illustrations just include oriental elements, but rather that they revolve around them. The subjects of his works range from koi to fans to people, but even when they are people, they are clearly people of Asian descent. Nevertheless, in terms of his web designs, Nick La’s work is more mainstream. He is a good designer in that he knows how to keep his pages interesting without overwhelming the viewer. He is also good at creating layouts that are easy to navigate.
In conjunction with keeping things simple and easy to navigate, La’s icons are great. They’re simple, but fun, and easy to identify. Because of these reasons it’s no wonder that he has been able to create a whole site revolving around them. In his illustrations and web designs he likes to use a variety of color and gradients. These work well in keeping the viewer engaged, but also drawing their eye to important aspects like headings and links. Finally, although the majority of his styles and works are strong and well-planned out, Nick La could work a bit more on drawing his inspiration from things other than Chinese and Japanese culture. It seems that his artistic abilities may be limited by this theme.
Art and Information Sources:
http://vector.tutsplus.com/articles/interviews/interview-with-nick-la/
Nick La's Webdesign and icons look really nice. The colors are rich and vibrant. I like them a lot. They definitely go with his subject matter of koi, fans, people of asian descent. The different values of color and overall style remind me of a light water color painting.
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