Ethical Designing

James Victore 


James Victore is a self-taught, independent artist and designer. Clients include Moet & Chandon, Aveda, Esquire and TIME Magazines, Bobbi Browns cosmetics, and The New York Times. He has been awarded an Emmy for television animation, and Gold and Silver Medals from the New York Art Directors Club.

Victores posters have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and are also permanent collections in the Lourve, Paris, the Library Congress, Washington, DC, the Design Museum in Zurich and many more. He regular lectures and teaches around the globe in School of Visual Arts in NY. His book 'Victore or, Who Died and Made You Boss?' was released in 2010. He currently lives in Brooklyn, NY and continues to work on his art.

Art Work 

To the left is an example of James Victore well-known work. I think the great thing about this piece of art work is the use of colour. Although so simple, the image and use of the colours is very forceful and vivid. The black makes the font look bold and despite the limited colours, I think the use of just the red 'C' is simple but in a distinct way making it stand out. I think the choice of these particular colours works well because both relate to or are associated with energy, war, danger, power, innocence as well as passion - all of which in some way have a strong affiliation with 'Racism' The art manages to stick out so well with its use of colour and type face, the big red 'C' right in the centre successfully makes the art work catch the eye.

The use of text is notably original, you don't usually come across a piece of artwork about racism that is so forward with its message despite the fact it is a one word piece of art. I would describe the type face as expressive and it looks as though it is freehand. The type face looks 'scratchy' and It would be the sans serif font as it isn't so 'put together'. The scale of the writing varies throughout the word, the 'C' is clearly larger than the rest of the writing this is something that especially makes the art work bold. The typeface relates to the fact that racism is related with hatred and intolerance of other races, it look powerful and could almost be described as angry.

The only bit of imagery that is within this piece of art work is the 'monster'/toothed letter C, the artwork is abstract as it expresses word racism in a powerful way. The use of the monster is specially effective. A monster can be described as something that is ugly, or monstrous or something that is wicked and cruel - this entirely links in with the fact that the piece of art work is giving of a message that racism is a evil and a cruel belief. Looking at the image I assume that the piece has been hand drawn, Victore is well-known for his work being drawn freehand using Sharpie pens, and I believe that is what he has used to create this artwork as well. Although, I do think that the colours had most likely been enhanced on a computer. I don't think that more imagery should have been used, James Victore has managed to get a good balance between imagery and text yet still making the piece powerful and eye catching.

The great thing about this image is the fact of although it is just one word and a small image, the use of text, imagery and colours is something so forceful. Being one of his most well-known pieces of art work it is clear in the fact that the piece has managed to attract so many to it. I feel as though there is something individual and intriguing about the image that no other artist matches because of its look of being something that looks as though it was quickly sketched out on a rough piece of paper, this making the piece so successful.


"It's about whittling. It's about taking something and whittling and whittling and getting it sharp and perfect. Then you've got something" - James Victore 

More Artwork 

Pretty Powerful for Bobbi Brown Makeup

Selection of Artwork - Cultural Poster for the city of NY (Disney Go Home), Racism,  AIDS images, Advertising 

Artwork for Empire magazine

There Are No Shorcuts, poster for NYC Department of Probation 

Videos & Interviews

 How do I find my voice? My style? Youtube video with James Victore

'What's the value of your creative voice? A lot, according to designer James Victore. Using some of his own creative challenges as examples, Victore argues that it is only through finding your voice, your fears, and your passion -- and expressing them -- that you can make great work'

James Victore on The Great Disconnect

Interviewer: What was your path to what you;re doing right now? 

James: I was born to do this job. I was born to be a graphic designer. As a kid, I drew and made wordplay constantly. Malcolm Gladwell has this idea that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to achieve mastery at something. My 10,000 hours started when I was five.

The other important thing to note is that my mother worked in the reference department of the university library in the town where I went to school. We lived outside of town, so when I’d get out of school at 3pm, I’d go to the library for an hour or more to wait for my mom to get off of work. My mom needed to make me busy and she knew I liked to draw, so she’d put a stack of books in front of me—Graphis annuals from the 1960s and 70s, Italian design manuals, and art books. She’d also give me onionskin paper to draw on. I poured through those books, which gave me a huge graphic design history at age 11.

James on life at college: I didn’t have any money because I was spending it all on beer, skirt, and rent. One of those things had to go and it was rent. I printed 5,000 posters myself and paid to have them put up on the street. 

By the time I was 32, I had found my dharma. I was making these posters, which allowed me to travel the world. In fact, all of my work that’s in the MoMA was made by the time I was 32.

My Work: 

This next part of work links to the Ethical Designer we studied. We took inspiration from the designs to make our own and join them and make them relate to Arms Around The Child. The research helped me come up with different facts that I could link to pictures and make them into a graphic. Below are the 4 designs that I planned out:- 

The first design on the bottom is an idea that immediately popped into my head. I personally feel this is the most effective design idea out of the four i came up with. I took a lot of inspiration from James Victore's existing artwork firstly I chose the orphan silhouette because it linked directly to the fact that is shown ('3.5 million children are infected with the HIV virus'). The type font was restricted at the time but if I was to choose this design I would possibly changed the fonts and sizes, giving a bit more life and complexity to it. Once again if I chose this design I would alter the colours, instead of black font and white image I wanted to switch this so I had a black image and white font excluding the word HIV as I want this to be red.
My second design once again relates to the fact that is written in the image. Clearly the shape is of a medicine bottle and the fact is '£20 per month helps to provide life saving medicines and treatment for a child'. I had the idea to have a white medicine bottle with black writing apart from the cross shape would be shown through certain words and letters in the writing being a bit lighter. I did think the idea was good however I didn't think it stood out as much and it wasn't so eye catching. 

I didn't want all my design ideas to look the same, so i varied the next two ideas. The top idea was to support stopping trafficking. I wanted to really make this design different and stand out. The idea was to have the typeface in a 'paintbrush' written way  and go gradient from black to red , then from the letter 'T' at the beginning of trafficking have the children again from gradient black to red, running and climbing away from trafficking as though they are trying to get away, and they want it to stop.  The second design was to represent the fact that '5.8 children die of hunger a year', I wanted to make the design for this really powerful. My idea was to have at top top of the poster a silhouette a collection of food or perhaps food shopping, then underneath the fact 'falling' from the picture, but joined onto it. Then once again beneath that, the children in silhouette reaching up and trying to get to the food, but they cant quite reach - this all on top of a red background.

So I decided on doing my first design, and I had different ways that I wanted to do this, my first idea was to have the writing of the fact in black 'paintbrush' like writing filling up the shape of the orphan, so there wasnt actually an outline of them but the writing would make it look as if there was. My over idea of how to go about this was to have the orphan painted in black as if it was a silhoueete then have white writing on top of it, in different fonts and sizes. I decided to go with the second idea as I think it related more to James Victores designs, below is how I did this:-

The first thing I had to do was create the silhouette of the 'orphan'. I done this by tracing an image onto a A3 sized paper so it was big and clear enough to type onto on the later steps. I thought the best way to get the clearest black was to paint it, therefore I used water colours and went over a few coats to get this really strong black colour.

The next step I had to take was to transfer the picture of my painting into Adobe Illustrator where i'd be able to begin putting in the text. After putting the picture into Illustrator, I firstly cropped it down so that the table round the outside was not visible. And as I wanted to make the black colour a lot stronger, I used the Curves tool to alter the contrast and brightness making it look full white background and dark black image. The I then began to insert fonts, I found two fonts on dafont.com that I thought suited great to this graphic and to match James Victore style of work. The two fonts I used were called 'Levi Brushed' which is the one that looks like a painting and 'So Thin' which is obviously the smaller one - i thought the contrast of the small thin font and bold large font worked really well and made the image stand out but not look to compact. Finally I added the Arms Around The Child Logo round the bottom so people knew what the image was representing. Below is my final outcome!...