This is the first post from one of our new contributors, The Paper Boat Creative, which is one of the agencies at blur Designs. It is a young design company based in Hackney, London and is managed by Creative Director, Rebecca van Ommen.  The aesthetic vision of the company is to continually apply illustration and paper craft into digital media.  The team’s background is strongly rooted in traditional craft from painting, illustration, prop making and jewelry design.  This mix of old craft and new media make their images look playful, organic, surreal yet crispy clean. 

It’s nice to see a humorous approach to 3D graphics, such as this work by Portugese graphic designer and illustrator João Oliveira. His work is whimsical, fanciful and light-hearted, bringing to mind the contents of our old toy boxes.

This year is going to usher in a lot more retro graphic design and 3D work, with a lighter approach than we have seen over the past few years. After all, in movies like Transformers and Inception we have proved that we can create some incredibly realistic 3D motion graphics, and now we want to have some fun. But there are strings attached to this trend. There is something very endearing about seeing artwork with a few errors in the mix – call it wabi sabi design – and 2012 will see a lot of intentional errors in advanced 3D graphics. They will be placed there on purpose to remind us all that it is a set-up. But beware, because these kooky graphics will often walk hand-in-hand with realistic ones, meaning that you won’t know what is and isn’t real. We welcome a more playful side to 3D!

Don’t forget that if you want graphics, humorous, 3D or otherwise, then you can submit your brief now to great creatives on the Exchange.