Designers in Seoul
Designers in Tokyo
Designers in Taipei
Column Four
Comics
Zosia Dzierżawska is an illustrator & comic author from Warsaw, Poland, and a co-founder of Studio Armad’illo, an illustration and graphic design studio based in Milan. She works for a variety of international publishers, using her soft, expressive lines in children’s books, comics and editorial illustration.
Previous collaborations include Oxford University Press, Rizzoli, Candlewick Press, and others. Her works have been awarded twice at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair Illustrators Exhibition, as well as at the Society of Illustrators in New York.
She loves getting her hands dirty with inks, watercolors, greasy pencils, and other traditional media.
Nobrow, Candlewick Press, I'm Changing, Oxford University Press, The Chopin Museum, The New York Times
Bologna Children's Book Fair Illustrator's Exhibition (twice),
Society of Illustrators New York Annual (twice),
Sydney Taylor Book Award (US),
Children's Literature Festival (PL)
I have the impression that design culture in Poland has been changing in a good way over the last few years. Increasingly, clients see value in what we do and appreciate it. Of course, there will also be people who do not fully value our work, in which case it is better to let such a project go.
Polish design consistently marks its presence on global markets, combining diferent perspectives that reflects the cultural context of Poland, while perfectly adapting to the expectations of customers from all over the world. Today polish design not only draws on its history and regional motifs, creatively reinterpreting patterns from the past, but also develops by embracing new values like: innovation, responsibility, resourcefulness, locality, and nostalgia.
I think that Polish design is mainly associated with the Polish school of posters – and this is definitely superficial, because we had very good illustrators and an extremely interesting history of typography and the geopolitical changes that influenced its development.
Though this is about illustration, I think there is a tendency to prefer narrative and explanatory elements over visual (graphical ) interest. (But maybe things have changed a bit recently?)