SUSTAINABILITY DRAWINGS
DESIGN GOLD AWARD
PROFESSIONAL
2009 – IMAGES 33
Olivier Kugler was born in 1970 in Stuttgart, Germany. He grew up in Simmozheim, a small village, in the Black Forest. Olivier is influenced by French/Belgian bande desinées and Otto Dix. After military service in the Navy, Olivier studied graphic design in Pforzheim (Germany) and worked as a designer in Karlsruhe for a few years… got terribly bored with it and received a scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service to do a masters degree in Illustration at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Since then Olivier is working as an Illustrator in London for clients all over the world. He likes to do reportage illustrations, loves to draw people he meets and places he visits. He prefers to draw on location or from own reference photos and likes to colour his drawings on his laptop.
Olivier Kugler is the overall winner of the 2011 V&A Illustration Awards for his depiction of a truck driver’s journey across Iran, featured in French quarterly reportage magazine XXI. His clients include The Guardian, XXI, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Reader's Digest, The New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine and Harper's Bizarre.
olivierkugler.com
Fletcher Priest Architects in London asked Olivier to do a large series of drawings documenting some of their projects and portraying some of the people involved in these projects. The drawings were used in the practice's publication Freethinking – our take on Sustainability.
“I was happy. The client was happy. I received more work from the client.”
BRIEF: Fletcher Priest Architects in London asked me to do a larger series of drawings documenting some of their projects and portraying some of the people involved in these projects. The drawings were used in the practice's publication "Freethinking – our take on sustainability".
MATERIALS: HB Pencil drawing, digital colouring.
RESEARCH: Before visiting the sites I got briefed by the client about the message they wanted to get across in each drawing. For most of the drawings I was able to visit the sites and to meet the people I had to draw. On location I took tons of reference photos and recorded short interviews with the people I was going to do portraits of.
PROCESS: In the studio I made thumbnail sketches showing the client roughly how I imagined the finished drawings to look like. After approval of the sketches I started working on the line drawings using the photos as reference. The colouring and some of the layout of the drawings was done digitally. At the end I also added handwritten text into the drawings.
NUMBERS: I think there were 20 double page spread drawings in total.