South African designer and illustrator Justin Poulter was asked by Herbal Skateboards to design a mini-series of board graphics. The British skateboarding brand first noticed Justin’s unique and versatile style while he was working at the award winning UK-based design studio, I Love Dust.
Justin, stimulated to keep with the theme of the brand, decided to focus on biological drawings as his first point of reference. He discovered the work of German biologist and artist Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel and from there his designs morphed into something more abstract and psychedelic.
“Taking influence from the shapes and forms of Haeckel, I began drawing my own versions of these microscopic organisms. I then added some less abstract elements to bring the compositions back to earth a bit,” says Justin about his creative process.
The two skateboard graphics are colour coded; the blue boards are titled Oligotrophic – an adjective that describes an organism that can live in an environment with very low levels of nutrients, and the green and white boards were given the name Embryophyta – the collective term for most green vegetation primarily adapted for life on land.
