Each month The Dots hosts an evening Portfolio Review session at a different creative workspace in London. Shutterstock's Art Director Eric Sams joined as a mentor for the March event at M&C Saatchi focussed on Advertising.
To kick off the evening, Eric shared insights into the styles and trends that will dominate 2017 based on the billions of searches on Shutterstock, plus expert knowledge from their design, video, and music teams. You can view the entire interactive 2017 Creative Trends Infographic to learn more.
The Dots team also caught up with Eric before the reviewing sessions started to delve a little further into his creative world.....
1. Who were your early heroes (and what do you think of them now in retrospect)?
“I went to art school when I was 15, I was surrounded by a lot of digital art and I got really inspired by Ed Ruscha, John Michel Basquiat and the way that he integrated typography into fine art. I kind of became obsessed with typography.”
2. Tell us a bit about a project you are most proud to have been a part of
“ I think the projects that I have been most proud of have also been a lot of fun to work on. I really love the content marketing work that I have contributed to at Shutterstock. One of the posts that we created was called “Game of Brands” where we re-imagined the Game of Thrones Houses as modern day corporations. It was a lot of fun… imagine the Targaryen House with the Dragons as an airline, the House of Snow became a winter outerwear company!”
3. What inspires your work?
"When I moved to the Netherlands, I became fascinated by how brands localise or stay consistent globally. For example, G-star as a brand is the same all over the world, you’ll see the same windows and the same graphics package in New York, Berlin, Amsterdam… But with fast food companies like McDonald’s, which you might think of as red and yellow, in the Netherlands it's green! I have been fascinated by brands and how they expand globally!”