We’re proud to announce a new designer has been added to the family, Assault, Fernando Rodriguez. Fernando, formerly of Ecko, is currently in the preliminary stages of launching his own design agency called EyeKandy. He currently resides in New York, but will be moving back to Puerto Rico to dedicate his time to developing his new company EyeKandy.

The shirt he has designed for Assault comes in black and white and is called Fatal Justice. It features the classic underlying political message that Assault has become known for, as well as some of our favorite design motifs–skulls!!!

Fernando had the idea from his experience living under the Puerto Rican government. There’s alot of corruption, like in most governments, but especially in the Latin American governments. His other inspiration for the design comes from the current situation in Darfur. Some common themes in this design as well as in many other Assault designs are about how greed for power leads to killing and mass poverty among the working class.

The design’s major theme being about how there really is no more equal justice for the rich and the poor. Justice has just become a beautiful icon, and is no longer what it used to be. Fernando hand draws all of his designs, and then inks them and scans them into Illustrator. He uses live trace and later brings them into Photoshop to clean them up. The color palette is neutral based to further emphasize the grunge look to go along with his original idea for the concept.

Fernando is a graduate of the Savannah College of Art and Design. If you’d like Fernando to do some apparel design work for you, or… if you’d like to contact him because you are a pretty lady who likes artists, you can go to his personal website and email him–especially if you live in Puerto Rico, or NYC.

Relavant Links

• EyeKandy
• Fernando’s Personal Website
• Buy the Fatal Justice T-Shirt in Black
• Buy the Fatal Justice T-Shirt in White

After attempting to debunk how Tom Muller did some of his work for Wired magazine I decided to ask him a few additional questions such as  where he gets his inspiration from, and how he got involved in graphic design. Here’s what he had to say…

AssaultBLOG: You mention in pretty good detail how you got out of college in Antwerp and were sort of poking around the yellow pages looking for a “real world” job as your father had pushed you to get into as soon as possible, and that you wanted to get into “THE COOL STUFF”. I know that looking back on college there was a few things I wish I had done differently… and was wondering if you could go back would there be anything you would do differently?

Hmm… Not really. I had a great time in college actually. I didn’t always see eye to eye with my teachers (who does?), but overall I had a good experience; and especially my graduation project was something I had complete control over and that kind of kick started my professional career. The only thing I’d change if I could go back is pay more attention to design history.

AB: Are there any somewhat non-traditional or unusual places you look for design influence?

Anything and everything really. I don’t go looking for specific things to get inspiration. Can be anything – something I see, read, hear… very random.

AB: Most designers struggle with knowing when a project is complete, and personally I know I always have a hard time deciding when a design is done–Can you think of one or two projects in the past ten years in that you were most satisfied with the results? Was there ever a really challenging project that you had a hard time nailing down ideas, or deciding when a design was finished?

To be honest I’m really happy with the stuff I’m currently doing. That’s not to say that my older work has lost its value, but looking back I can see the errors and me struggling a bit finding my way and style if you will. I’d say the work from 2004 onwards is the work I’m most proud of, where I feel that I finally got into a direction I’m happy with – with the Mam Tor Publishing and Ashley Wood projects in particular.

AB: You mention in your blog that you were highly experimental with Photoshop in its early stages ten years ago when it had a 99 layer limit. Since your beginning use with Photoshop has there been one feature, or technique that you can remember learning that totally changed the way you work and design in the software?

Well, “highly experimental” is mildly overstating that I basically didn’t know what I was doing in the beginning and just playing around finding my way around the application and being very impressed with lens flare effect and the like.

I think the computer as a whole changed my way of working, because I got into it pretty late (I was 24 when I finally got my own Mac at home) and used to draw and paint more. So going digital was a complete change for me.

AB: The design work on hellomuller.com spans a broad range of mediums–is there one particular medium that you’ve found you enjoy the most and if so why?

Its all of them. Its all graphic design, just applied to a different medium – be it in print or on screen. I like both, thats why I do them. Although I love doing web design, I need to be able to do some print work to counter balance looking at html and work at 72dpi all day.

Being able to switch between designing a site, or a book, or a logo is what keeps everything fresh and interesting. I don’t want to be doing the same thing all the time.

AB: Are there any mediums you would like to transition into in the future that you may have not already tackled?

Designing a title sequence for a feature film would be interesting to do I think. And comics/graphic novels of course. That one is always high on the list, its just a matter of finding the time and putting my money where my mouth is.

AB: I know you recently launched a website collaboration with your wife…what is it like to collaborate with her, and do you find that collaboration in general makes for better design? Or is there a perfect formula for the number of “chefs in the kitchen” where the design work tends to turn out the best?

Collaborating with her is great. Design-wise we really click in terms of what we like, how we approach a problem and execute it. She’s much more technical than me, so when we’re designing a book for example more often than not she’ll end up designing the actual guts of the book while I play with the more superficial stuff like logos etc. She’s also really good in cutting through the design bullshit and go for effortlessly simple solutions, whereas I’m always trying to come up with needlessly complex visuals and over design it to the point where a seemingly random dot is actually placed in some grid I made up. Just for that dot.

AB: Do you feel it’s important for designers to do personal work and use their skills to address social and economic issues as well as to keep their own voice?

Well, one aspect of being a graphic designer is that you have to realize you’re working in a service industry, and that its our job to communicate other people’s messages. Whether that’s for a global corporation or the local salvation army.

On the other hand I think its very important that designers initiate personal work, if only to keep things interesting and grow creatively.

Relevant Links:

• Comic Book Tattoo – The graphic anthology of the year
  
• Hello Muller
• Tom’s Blog
• Mr. and Mrs. M (Tom and his wife’s site)