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Four Illustrator practice pieces: pencils built from gradients, a wristwatch layered shape by shape, four gradient icons, and a typography wallpaper where the size does the talking.
Which one would you stop at? 👇
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Was playing around with Rogie King's Noise & Texture plugin in Figma and thought it’d be fun to throw in a few excerpts from Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar.
One thing led to another, and I ended up with these experiments in typography and texture.
It got me thinking about how texture and typography can do more than just look interesting. They can help communicate the mood and meaning behind the words.
What do you think? Does the chaos add to the story, or get in the way of it?
For me the chaos works when it stays tied to the words, like the tangle looping around "One by One". On the dense excerpt layouts legibility starts to eat the story, so I'd keep the noise away from the lines you want read first.
Tales of Mystery & Notification 🕯️🔴
What if Harry Clarke had illustrated our nightmares? In 1919 he drew Edgar Allan Poe's. I asked him to draw ours.
I went digging through the Public Domain Image Archive and found Clarke's 1919 plates for Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination: black-and-white ink by a Dublin stained-glass artist, all long pale fingers and dread. I trained ten of them into a Recraft style, Clarke Ink 1919.
Then I retold ten of Poe's tales as the horrors of the smartphone age. Each plate sits beside Clarke's original, and each caption is his own line with one word swapped: "the heart beat on with a muffled sound" became "the phone buzzed on". A man is buried alive in his inbox. The masked guest is a 99+ badge.
The only colour in the whole book is the red notification dot. The film ends inside Recraft, showing how it was made.
@Recraft
Happy Halloween. The style is public, so try it yourself 👇
This is an example of how simple art can be turned into films.
Everything is so refined and polished. I genuinely wanna know how did you come up with this?
CANTIN | You know our coffee. Meet the neighbors.
I found John James Audubon's The Birds of America (1827–1838) on Wikimedia Commons and in the National Gallery of Art's open collection, hand-coloured engravings where every bird is drawn life-size on the plant it lives on. I cropped seven public-domain plates, without captions or plate numbers, and trained a Recraft V4 Style on them that I called Audubon Aves do Brasil. Audubon never painted Brazil, so I used his way of drawing on Brazilian birds that live around our coffee farms. To tie it together I created CANTIN, an invented Brazilian coffee brand with the campaign line "You know our coffee. Now meet the neighbors." That brand is the twist, since his plates now sell a 2026 coffee on the poster, the campaign seal, the labels, the tins and the kraft bags.
How the neighbors were made, in 30 seconds.