Similar to fashion design, graphic design is often overlooked for its beauty. Ever used a mobile app that just.. works? Perhaps you’ve admired the font of a recent business card you received. All these things are done by the under-appreciated work of graphic designers. Artists in their own right, graphic designers are like the pragmatics of the art world; while the creative artists are stretching boundaries, the graphic designers are quietly making your world just a little more beautiful.
One such designer I came across recently was Andrew Gorkovenko of Yellow Dog Creative. This Russian designer has recently made a splash with his series of tea leaf art for TripTea. By carefully shifting and reshifting piles of dried tea leaves, Gorkovenko painstakingly coaxes out scenes of trees, mountains and rivers. These delicate pieces of art were then photographed and printed onto TripTea packaging to form exclusive 3-part pieces of art, or triptych. Gorkovenko’s work for TripTea was really quite special, not only because of the exacting nature of his process, but also because of the thoughtfulness behind it. Each landscape was chosen to reflect the origin of the tea leaves used to create it and even the concept of using the photographs to create triptych’s was conceived by the resemblance of the word to the brand name.
Such thoughtfulness is a hallmark of a solid designer and Gorkovenko demonstrates it repeatedly in his online portfolio. In another campaign, he uses color and the twirls of pasta to cleverly convey the vibrant food culture of Italy. Each pasta is played by a character with its own personality and buyers can peek at the pasta through sheer panels in the packaging that also double as the character’s hair.
Gorkovenko even manages to elevate a boring annual report by revamping it into a passport, evoking the international influence of the client. Every detail was meticulously executed for this project. The use of thin leather covers, passport stamps and even putting the company’s president on display as the “owner” of the passport all added to the illusion of luxurious travel to exotic locales. Gorkovenko took something that literally could just be presented within a binder and made it into something special to be remembered.
You can check out more of Gorkovenko’s work on his website or via Yellow Dog Creative.
