One of the great things about moving into my new studio space at the end of last year, was that I got to meet a whole new group of artists, designers, photographers and other creative types.

One of those designers is Glenn Thomas. Glenn put together the header and element design for our Joomla template release Arcadia and as you can see he is a seriously talented illustrator.

I wanted to get an idea of his workflow and design process so I asked him the following questions ...

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? How long have you been a designer? Where did you study? What sort of work do you do?

Morning'. I've been a full-time freelancer for about 5 years now, originally in straight photo-manipulation artworks before venturing into Illustration & Animation about 2yrs ago. I did a very broad 2 year Diploma of Multimedia at RMIT TAFE, but essentially ended up self-teaching all of the skills I use today. Que obligatory reference to my online teaching class.

And where / when / how did the Fox and the King come about?

It was two years ago, and sitting at a crossroads with my then business partner. We had been running a company called 'We Are Synapse' for about three years but we wanted more and didn't know how to get it. We were looking at getting into branding but when I got back from a trip to Japan I had decided it best to go out on my own and pursue Illustration - two years later here we are.

Your work has a really unique feel, can you tell us a little bit about your design process? Where do you get inspiration from? Who or what are your biggest influences? Do you have any favourite illustrators?

Thank you! I am drawn to mid-century design and style for it's colour palette, retro-future aesthetic and concepts, and wonderful use of simple geometry. Cars looked better, people dressed better, buildings looked better, furniture looked beed (you get where I'm going with that). Inspiration comes from anywhere and everywhere. Sitting in traffic and seeing how the car brake lights are hitting the pooling water on the road. There are so many wonderfully talented illustrators out there, all of whom make me hate myself a little every day - to name just a few: Patrick Leger, Jon Klassen, Lou Ramano, Shag, Tadahiro uesugi, Tomer Hanuka.

How important is it to you to do offline design work? What sort of design tools are in your toolkit?

Pretty standard set of tools for me. A notebook is where most jobs start - Notes, sketches, doodles later turned into vectors in Illustrator and finally into textured Photoshop file. If we're getting really fancy I'll take those Vectors and drop them into After Effects.

Which is your favourite piece from your own folio and why?

Purely for the glory that this was the most layers I've ever had in a Photoshop file, this CD Cover I did for Last Aurora which at best memory totalled around 800 layers.

Thanks for having me Anthony!

Pleasure!

You can stalk Glenn on Twitter, Dribbble and check out his other folio work.

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