Catalina Estrada Uribe
AGE: 31
JOB: Graphic designer and illustrator
LOCATION: Barcelona, Spain
SOFTWARE USED: Illustrator and Photoshop

There’s something quite enchanting about Catalina Estrada’s work. She creates other-worldly scenes with an aesthetic borne out of Illustrator’s array of gradients and fills alongside her own fascination with nature.

Although currently based in Barcelona, Estrada was born and raised in the countryside in Colombia. “Now that I live in the city I realise how much I miss that contact with nature – all its colours and its life,” she says. “Nature has a great value to me and always takes part in my work somehow.”

Estrada’s mother is another key influence: “She has a sense of colour that I’ve never seen before,” says Estrada, who also admires traditional folk art for its spontaneity and colour.

To date, Estrada’s biggest challenge has been an exhibition of her works, and she plans a further exhibition this year. She’s currently illustrating the story of Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp as part of the Die Gestalten Verlag title 1001 Nights.

To find out more about Catalina Estrada Uribe’s work visit www.katika.net

Nik Ainley
AGE: 23
JOB: Digital artist
LOCATION: Oxford, UK
SOFTWARE USED: Photoshop, with “dabblings in Illustrator and various 3D packages”

When the Computer Arts team first saw Nik Ainley’s Shiny Binary website, its high-tech shininess nearly melted our eyes. Ainley produces stunningly intricate Photoshop compositions that include amazing illustrative and 3D elements.

Ainley admires the work of vault49, as well as fellow members of the depthCORE digital arts community. His biggest project to date is his own website, which took him six months to create in Photoshop, before it was turned into HTML.

Describing himself as a “compulsive day dreamer”, Ainley now plans to get to grips with Illustrator, which he feels has even more potential power than Photoshop. He would also love to boost his skills in Flash and a ‘proper’ 3D program.

Ainley has plans to develop his website over the next year into something “bigger and shinier”, too. And his outlook is pretty optimistic: “If everyone stops liking what I do, I don’t give too much of a shit as long as it still makes me smile.”

To find out more about Nik Ainley’s work, visit www.shinybinary.com or the depthCORE community site at www.depthcore.com

Andreas Gaschka
LOCATION: Mainz, Germany
AGE: 22
JOB: Motion designer
SOFTWARE USED: Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, After Effects, Cinema 4D, Maya, Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro

Motion graphics is an emerging design form, and many of today’s designs are little more than eye-candy. But Andreas Gaschka leads the way in informational motion work.

Gaschka is a student of Media Design at FH Mainz University of Applied Sciences. He won acclaim at last year’s Adobe Design Achievement Awards for his Traffic Advisories – a visualisation of television traffic announcements designed for broadcast. His animation shows the location of traffic jams in a city on a 3D map and is an idea we could imagine being adopted by a major news service.

Much of Gaschka’s work involves 3D, but he’s currently rediscovering ‘analogue techniques’, such as pencils, markers, ink, felt-tip pens, watercolours and spray cans.

Gaschka is also a big fan of psyop, WeWorkForThem, Buck, ZNKdojo, viagrafik and bionicsystems. He begins an internship at DMC Hamburg in March 2006 and on completion would like work at a motion design agency in the US.

To find out more about Andreas Gaschka’s work visit his website at www.gaschgrafik.de

Tom Judd
LOCATION: Manchester and Salisbury, UK
AGE: 21
JOB: Illustrator and animator
SOFTWARE USED: Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, After Effects and Premiere Pro

Hands up, how many of you can draw well? Yeah, we thought as much. Maybe it’s time we took a leaf out of Tom Judd’s book and did a bit of doodling once in a while.

Tom Judd is a mixed media illustrator and animator who blends traditional and digital techniques. His work is heavily influenced by the work of scribbler Jon Burgerman, who he describes as: “a great example of how to doodle for a living.”

Judd’s biggest project to date has been Everyday, in which he set himself the challenge of drawing a page in a book every day for a year. The result involved 365 manic pages of observational drawing and “monsters and things”.

Still a student on the BA (Hons) Illustration with Animation degree at Manchester Metropolitan University, Judd hopes to move down to London on graduation to make his fortune drawing pictures of robots and monsters.

To find out more about Tom Judd’s work visit his website at www.tomjudd.co.uk

Joakim Jansson
LOCATION: Oslo, Norway
AGE: 25
JOB: Graphic designer “with an illustrative touch”
SOFTWARE USED: Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash and Dreamweaver

Joakim Jansson is so cool it hurts. His illustration work captures the zeitgeist with images that combine riotous colour with the current vogue for 80s style icons.

Jansson is a graduate of Hyper Island, Oslo’s infamous School of New Media Design. Working with a graphics tablet, he creates vector illustrations by scanning drawings created with pen on paper, including several illustrations that have featured in Dazed and Confused magazine.

Jansson’s ambition is to set up his own design studio and he has quite a specific vision for it.

“I’d love to set up a small studio with my best friends in a two-floor building,” he says. “On the first floor, we’d have a nice little T-shirt and nerdy gadgets shop, and would always play good music. On the second floor, we’d have our studio and create good work, and have fun every day. It’s a must to have a pole down to floor one, like all the cool firemen have.”