Timeouts are lightning-quick interviews. Five questions to help you get to know the players holding court at Dribbble. Many thanks to Emir for being today’s interviewee.
Who are you? Let us know where you hail from and what you do.
Hi, my name is Emir Ayouni. I’m a graphic designer who helps people brand their stuff and draw for them, if they have an interesting project and some coin.
I was born and raised in the great city of Piteå in the northern parts of Sweden. I live and work out of Oslo, Norway were I run my little design shop Growcase full time + a lot of extra time.
What are you working on?
Right now I’m waist deep in a whole bunch of branding projects, ranging from locksmiths to science groups to film makers to mechanics to musicians etc, etc. In other words, it’s a wide variety of clientele.
At this very moment tho, I’m working for an old friend of mine with a re-branding for his gourmet sauce factory and packaging for his products as he just signed a deal with a big supermarket chain in Sweden. Having a blast with it.
Also, doing some web design and illustrative stuff for Spacebound Creative, who I crafted branding for earlier this year. I’m doing some new cover art for Son-of-Light. Some artwork for a Football Game. Well, a whole bunch of stuff… it’s actually daunting to list them like this. I can almost feel an ulcer coming on as we speak, haha.
Oh, and I’m trying to complete the re-design of my portfolio.
Choose a favorite shot of yours. Why is it a favorite?
I think it would have to be the shot of the emblem and complementary logo mark I made for Tokyo Bicycles. Because of the great responses and feedback I received from the Dribbble crowd.
Out of all that great constructive critique I got, I actually ended up changing only one color that someone pointed out should help balance the hierarchy and it made a world of difference and I think we nailed it.
I would say that about half of all the inquiries I get via your site has a mention of this shot. So you could say that it has served me well.
I used to work with Tobias, who now lives in Tokyo and runs his little bicycle photo-blog from there. This was something I did for him, in exchange for some web dev work, while I was at home and down with a fever.
And that reminds me, I need to collect that someday!
Tell us about your setup. What tools did you use to create the shot(s)? (e.g. hardware, software, pens, paper, blowtorch, etc.)
I flip between my stationary iMac and my Macbook Pro a whole lot. Sometimes separately as I move around from office to apartment to porch to commuting. Mostly tho, both at the same time. I try to use my Wacom tablet more, as people keep telling me that once you get used to it, it’s just superior to the mouse. But I’ve been working digitally with graphics since 1997, using a mouse and that habit is very hard to break.
And yes, I always keep a blowtorch close at hand, obviously.
As far as software goes, I got my Adobe Creative Suite, but mostly I just work in Photoshop and Illustrator. Sometimes tho, I have to get into InDesign and I need to mentally prepare myself a whole day in advance for that…
I wish I could show you something a bit more inspiring from my workplace, but we recently moved into this building. They just finished a complete renovation of this floor and everything here smells brand new and everything is white. I’m currently getting a bunch of artwork framed (posters from Aaron Draplin and Jon Contino), so until those get back, these office walls look like something from a sterile hospital hall, sadly. But I hope this will suffice.
Choose a favorite shot from another Player. Why do you dig it?
There are too many to pick from that are just extraordinary. Dribbble is so packed with fantastic art and with such a huge variety of styles and niches etc., but there’s a project that completely blew my mind. To me, this thing is the most impressive thing I’ve found on the site, to date. The "ME best methods mural" project by Bob Case.
Any of the shots from the project would qualify, but none of them does the entire thing justice, so I would advice everyone to check out that immense project in full. But let’s go with this one, displaying the right side of the mural.
Why I dig it? Well, I think I’ll just let this one speak for itself. I’ll say this tho: I’m pretty sure Bob is at least 50% martian.
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