Looking for Graphic Design Inspiration? Start With These 10 People on Behance

An incomplete list. What they have in common: they balance art and commerce well, and they manage to show both a brand's personality and the designer's own.

Whatever you make of the phrase "looks matter most," more and more people are studying design, working in design, or at least watching it.

Phone makers have run out of specs to talk about, so they talk about craft and beauty instead. There are too many apps, so competing on UI is unavoidable. There is no land left for new buildings, so storefronts get upgraded — better to hire a design firm with decent value for money, one that can cut a path through a crowd of industrial-style, pastel-fresh and neo-Chinese shops. Books, stationery, snacks and drinks go without saying: design is the brand, design is the tone, design is the markup.

It works the same way abroad. A Bilibili creator called Fulinfang had a foreign friend taste two flavors of pineapple cake, and someone still commented: "That one tastes better, but I like this brand's packaging more."

You can read this simply as the public's taste and demands rising, or as the combined product of consumption upgrading, the habit of reading by image, and the rise of the lifestyle economy. It is also becoming something brands fight over in the market.

A report from the U.S.-based Design Management Institute (DMI) puts it this way: on business performance, companies that take design seriously beat the S&P 500 average by 228%. "Applying top design talent to software, hardware and service interactions helps companies set themselves apart from competitors, deliver a better customer experience, and ultimately grow faster."

Against that backdrop, design has come to lean on online community platforms, much as other industries in the middle of an upgrade do. Designers need to find ideas faster, and to show their work more widely and more prominently to land jobs; ordinary people rely on the same platforms to feed their everyday appetite for good-looking things and to build their own taste.

That is why designer communities like Behance and Dribbble appeared and caught on. In UI design, VI design, graphic design and product design, they are arguably the two most popular gathering places for designers today. Behance was founded in New York City in 2006 and sold to Adobe six years later for US$150 million; by 2013 it had 1.5 million registered users. Dribbble was started in Massachusetts in 2009 by the web designers Rich Thornett and Dan Cederholm; by one count, 200 billion pixels of creative work had been shared there as of 2014.

Dribbble is the more specialized of the two. Sign-ups are 100% invitation-only; the range of work is narrower, mostly graphic design, VI design and illustration; uploads are capped at "shots" of 800×600 pixels at most, which puts the weight on design detail rather than long written explanations. It feels more like a room where people in the trade swap ideas.

For readers who want more than a scroll through Instagram — who want to know how good design actually comes together — Behance is probably friendlier. It covers far more ground: besides the categories above, there is architecture, craft, photography and advertising. Work is presented as "Projects," so images, video and text can walk you through the whole creative process, more clearly and more completely.

Its one flaw is that the comments are too friendly. The most common ones, in order: "nice," "wonderful," "amazing." After that comes: "Your work is great, come look at my new project! (link attached)"

The site creativeboom.com recently published the 60 graphic designers on Behance most worth following. We picked 10 of them, trying to span different regions, styles and categories. We hope they give you a bit of inspiration too (click a subheading to open the designer's page).

1. Saxon Campbell (New York)

Saxon Campbell is an American designer and photographer with his own studio in Brooklyn, New York. His work ranges widely, mostly collaborations with fashion or retail brands such as P&Co, Frockhub and The Monster Cycle.

One pairing shows up again and again: a close-up of a person or object in soft, large blocks of color, with rounded type set dead center. Plain, direct keywords bring clarity to photographs that would otherwise be ambiguous and hard to read.

2. Zim&Zou (Nancy, France)

Lucie Thomas, born in 1987 in the Vosges mountains of France, and Thibault Zimmermann, born in 1986 in Paris, met at university. After graduating they opened their own independent studio, Zim&Zou, in Nancy.

Both studied graphic design — design, publishing and advertising — but in daily practice they have put Photoshop and Illustrator aside and work on handmade installations instead. From sketch to cutting to assembly, the two try to tell stories with the most ordinary materials: paper, wood, thread, felt.

The finished pieces look like colorful handmade sculptures with a fable-like streak — traditional in technique, modern in feel. In a piece called "Douceur/Douleur" (Sweetness/Pain), they tried to fuse the ideas of "toy" and "weapon," using the delicate clash between innocence and violence, real and fake, to push people to think about child soldiers around the world. In a nature-themed window display for Hermès, folded-paper butterflies, owls, peacocks and foxes produce a strange beauty in which people and nature, the handmade and the God-made, both merge and fight.

Plenty of brands love Zim&Zou's work. Besides Hermès, their clients include IBM, Microsoft, Time, The Washington Post and The Mirror.

3. Thomas Hedger (London)

Some work leaves a mark at first glance and then gives you something new on a second look. That is how it is with the London illustrator Thomas Hedger.

You could call it simple — clean, strong lines and bright blocks of color — but there is plenty of flavor in it. It may remind you of the golden age of 1960s Pop Art, or make you feel that the core of some story has been scooped out, or that countless montages have been stacked into one shared theme.

Hedger's work turns up regularly in Wired, The Guardian and elsewhere.

4. Jessica Walsh (New York)

You may not know the name of the creative agency Sagmeister & Walsh, but you have certainly heard of one of its partners, Stefan Sagmeister.

The German designer is known for bold humor; his best-known work is probably the Grammy-winning Talking Heads CD box set. He explains his "happy design" philosophy with the same bluntness: "Right now we spend the first 25 years or so of our lives learning, the next 40 working, and the last 15 in retirement. It might make more sense to take five years out of retirement and slot them into the working years instead."

During those breaks Sagmeister is in fact still working — just on "projects he's interested in."

Four years ago he brought in a young designer to co-found Sagmeister & Walsh, and on the day the studio opened he emailed the press a nude photo of the two of them to introduce his new partner. That partner was Jessica Walsh.

Because Walsh won annual awards from the ADC, SPD and Graphis early on, coverage of her likes the phrase "genius designer." But her greatest strength is the same as Sagmeister's: she is good at finding the point where design and business cross.

In an interview with designboom.com, she said: "I think [my strength] is probably brand identity. I like to work conceptually, pulling the symbols or visual language we create across print, digital, television and other media into one coherent whole."

5. Kevin Harald Campean (Budapest)

Kevin Harald Campean is a Hungarian graphic designer who works in brand VI design and photography at the Hungarian firm Dekoratio Branding & Design Studio.

There is not much public information about him, which suits the tone of his work: monochrome palettes built on black and gray, spare and functional, with smooth lines. He likes to turn product pages into infographics by listing things out, which gives the work a quiet, orderly luxury — well suited, probably, to perfectionists and the obsessive-compulsive.

6. Maria Grønlund (Copenhagen)

Before she turned 30, the Danish designer Maria Grønlund's life looked like it belonged to music, not design. At 19 she entered a conservatory to study organ, with voice as a minor, then went on to study piano. Her days were mostly composing, practicing and playing concerts — quiet and regular.

At 30 she had the "I suddenly want a different life" moment, and she acted on it at once, as methodically as she had handled her music career: an apprenticeship at a commercial firm in 2007, a first graphic design job in 2009, and full-time independent work starting six years ago.

Perhaps because of that classical background, Maria's design looks like watercolor being played on paper — bright and full of imagination. Her most characteristic piece is a personal project, "I Speak Fluid Colors," made in two weeks she set aside in 2013; it has been viewed 176,000 times on Behance.

Put to work for tech brands, her watercolors can loosen up a sense of technology that is usually flat and either too juvenile or too corporate. Like Jessica Walsh, she insists that designers should keep their own character in commercial work: "You ask a client to explain what their unique selling point is. In the same way, a designer should ask what their own qualities are. I admire many designers, but if I simply copied their styles I couldn't bring a client any brand personality."

7. Anton Burmistrov (Tallinn, Estonia)

Anton Burmistrov, an Estonian, says he was born and raised in a country that no longer exists — the Soviet Union. He studied for a while at the Estonian Academy of Arts in the capital, Tallinn, then went on to the University of Greenwich. His real training as a designer came in London, at creative agencies including Hey Human, Brave and Leo Burnett.

In recent years he has done what many designers do and run his own studio from home, and clients he built up earlier followed him there: Red Bull, Procter & Gamble, Mercedes-Benz, Panasonic and others.

What Burmistrov seems to enjoy studying most is type. His work looks spare, but it borrows from tradition and runs on geometric elements that stress logic and order, which makes it feel larger.

8. Butcher Billy (Rio de Janeiro)

If you like Marvel, the NBA, rock or street culture, the Brazilian illustrator and designer Butcher Billy may be worth following. His client list explains why: ESPN, Billboard, Foot Locker, Stylist.

His own bio on Behance reads like the dramatic narration of a comic book, and brings to mind the double life of Batman or Iron Man: "By day, Butcher Billy is a creative director at a busy digital communications company in Brazil. But even as a child he knew he was meant for something more. Put a crayon in his small hand and no wall was safe, and nothing could stop him."

Much of Billy's work projects rock and pop culture, openly or not: David Bowie, Sid & Nancy, Joy Division, Radiohead. When those figures are mixed with newer elements, it is hard to say whether the work is stirring up your nostalgia or destroying it.

Billy thinks that is exactly right, and "he isn't going to apologize for it."

9. SocioDesign (London)

SocioDesign is a long-established graphic design firm in London whose staff includes photographers, copywriters, 3D artists, programmers, animators and designers. That is why the work tends to be more mature and more systematic. Its clients run from startups to multinationals.

Most of the work follows the minimalism that is most in fashion now. Making minimalism endlessly various, satisfying the brand and the consumer at once, is the harder trick — and that is exactly where SocioDesign stands out. Across different brands you can watch its minimalism change shape: luxurious, plain, serious, playful, feminine, masculine.

10. Shanti Sparrow (Brisbane, Australia)

If you like design full of childlike play and odd imagination, look past Scandinavia and pay more attention to Australia. The sheer number and strangeness of Australian craft-beer packaging makes the point on its own.

Shanti Sparrow, who now lives in Sydney, is one of those designers. Most of her clients are NGOs, and her elements are mainly animals and nature. She likes to mix digital collage into repeating arrangements of vector icons, which makes the work look fresh and mischievous — a light kind of Pop Art.

Cover image from creativeboom.com; other images from Behance.