Adam Maida - USA
The 26-year-old Rochester native is a self-taught artist, and says he isn't sure when his passion for drawing became a career in graphic design. Maida's diverse range of clients includes music promoters, local businesses, The New York Times, and independent filmmakers.
"I've always liked working with my hands," Maida says. "Even now, I'd say I use the computer maybe 60 percent of the time. Mostly for tweaking, final editing, but I usually always start with my hands, sketching."
Maida mostly creates physical collages, scanned in either piece by piece, or arranged and then scanned. If he's not sourcing material from his own photographs, paintings, or drawings, Maida cuts images from books, newspapers, magazines, and random ephemera he's collected over the years.
his style owes a lot to 1960's Cuban posters and to the Polish Poster School, specifically artists Henryk Tomaszewski and Roman Cielewicz.
Maida is fascinated by imagery created the Iron Curtain era, "because they were facing so much censorship," he says. "And so they would use visual metaphor, jokes or ideas to sneak their work past censorship bureaus."
Other clients have included New York City based advertising agencies, such as Sawyer, which provides promotion for documentaries, TV series, and film series. When he was commissioned to create a poster for the 2013 High Falls Film Festival, which historically features films about women or by female writers and directors, Maida took the opportunity to create a work that addressed how much women filmmakers have been overlooked.
His design was selected for inclusion in the upcoming Illustrators 56 book, which is put out annually by the Society of Illustrators.