DesignThinkers

Advertising agency Rethink worked with the RGD on an event theme and visual concept that would look just as fresh at the annual DesignThinkers Toronto conference (November 7 and 8, 2017) as it did on May 30 and 31 in Vancouver. The team came up with “Perspectives,” which nods not only to the varied speakers in the conference lineup, but to design itself.

As a brand-new event, the West Coast version had some additional requirements. “In the past, the RGD has promoted the conference mostly through posters mailed to members and previous attendees,” says Hans Thiessen, creative director at Rethink. “But there’s not many members here, so [the campaign] needed to be more social.”

Fumi Koike is a freelance Illustrator and Designer born in 1985, Japan, her illustrations are one of my favorites. I like the simplicity and the same time sophistication of her artworks. It is a feeling like going back home and lying on sofas. They are natural and make people’s brain relax. 

I met one of her illustration on a website called “douban”(pic1), this makes me a fan of her. In this artwork I see a something soft, dreamy, and eternal beyond everyday staffs. Her work is light, lovely, and all about comfort. The way her decorate her bedroom gives me some beautiful inspirations of architecture and my own house.

While most information about her tends to be in Japanese, Koike keeps her Facebook page in both English and Japanese (https://www.facebook.com/fumikoikeillustration/) , and the descriptions of her artworks have a wonderful softness to them, which sounds like a friend talking with you on sofa. What I love most is the way she make scenes of everyday, contemporary life feel quiet and pretty. Big wooden beds, eggs for breakfast and cold hands around hot mugs are just some of the seasonal imagery featured in her work, not forgetting the brilliant collection of dog painting. Fumi Koike seems to have latched on to that feeling and managed to illustrate it in this wonderful series of paintings.