In keeping with the theme of the previous post, here is Vancouver/LA-based illustration duo of Vicki Wong and Michael Murphy, known also as Meomi. Wonderful character design with soft palettes. Meomi is also responsible for the wicked olympic mascot designs for Vancouver 2010, and along with a lot of images showcasing the characters (see the Flickr set).
If that isn’t ambitious enough, they also have a line of children’s books, The Octonauts.
Check out Meomi’s Flickr stream to see their full range of work, as well as their pretty adorable website.
Meomi does awesome work. I love their stuff.
I saw the characters when I was looking at the NBC Olympics site last week and I really like their work. But I do find that they do look too similar to the Beijing Olympics mascots. I do have to wonder if it was the smartest choice to go with artists whose style draws from the same anime cartoon character inspiration as the team that developed the Beijing characters.
Otherwise I really dig many of their works.
I was living in Vancouver when they were unveiled. The public reaction was good, the critical reaction wasn’t, but when they went on sale, they sold like hot cakes. I missed out bringing any of them back to New Zealand by literally a matter of hours – gutted. The soft toys were actually quite big and very cute.
Paul, I was having a discussion about Olympic mascots and logos just last week, specifically the amount of criticism they receive. They never seem to bode well in the area they relate to because they need to include a slight bit of stereotype to make them recognizable on the world stage. Representing an entire culture or region with one symbol is a very slippery slope, with lots of opinions involved.
But in terms of the Vancouver mascots, I’m with you. I really dig them.
Commenting usually isnt my thing, but ive spent an hour on the site, so thanks for the info