Gale Force Win

At first glance, his ‘Damn it feels good to be a gangsta!’ (named after the Geto Boys hit of the same name) piece has a certain retro and simple charm to it. Look closer though, and you’ll see it’s populated by small yet deliberate details. So where did the idea come from in the first place?
“I was listening to that track a lot at the time,” he recalls. “It’s kind of my pre-going out tune! I wanted to narrow in on something relevant to Hot Press. I had to give myself some kind of field to work within because the description for the contest was very open, so I needed a starting point, and because it was for Hot Press it made sense to go with something music-related… I always prefer to do something that I love. I mainly do graphic design but I’m trying to branch out to illustrative work, so it felt right to do an illustration. I let my mind go for a wander, but I knew I wanted to come up with something colourful and fresh and interesting.”
With the eureka! moment out of the way, it was key that Rob approach his task in the right fashion. Despite painting with a different brush so to speak, he drew on the techniques instilled in him through his design background.
“It’s extremely important to identify just who you’re designing for and how you can achieve exactly that, and how to satisfy your audience,” he says. “I don’t really get much opportunity to do this kind of an illustration, so it came together pretty quickly. When you’re doing an illustration just for fun, an idea comes out of somewhere without you having to think too much about it, and once you have that start-off point, you can apply your own influences to it.”
Because he started early – scrawling posters at school was a favourite pastime of the young Gale – Rob has been exposed to all kinds of methods and styles. While old-school teachings have been a huge benefit, it’s the underground that really excites him.
“The great graphic designers of the past have helped us shape how we design today, even if some people don’t necessarily realise it, but it’s changed a little bit now. Initially I looked at modernists but there are so many great designers out there now who you find online that people may never see or even know about, but they’re producing incredible work. I love to flick through design websites and see what other designers are doing. It’s quite hard to pin down specific influences because it’s such a vast area full of categories.”
His work thus far has been more of a self-confessed “labour of love” than a determined vocation, but Rob appreciates the sometimes paradoxical nature of his chosen profession.
“Initially when you start working as a designer, you have ideas about stamping your style all over everything, but it doesn’t work out like that,” he reflects, before considering the realities faced by creative types assigned to a specific task.
“I think it’s the mark of a good designer if you can design to what each particular client wants and after a while you can identify different clients and what they want, enabling you to get there that little bit quicker. I think it’s unrealistic to think that you can put your own style on absolutely everything.”
But what about freedom of expression? Surely that’s an integral part of any design?
“When you get someone saying, ‘Look, you’re a designer, you know what will work visually for this, I’ll let you run free on it’, that’s rare, but it’s fantastic, because you can open up on it.”

Check out more of Rob’s work at behance.net/galeforcerob.