Dan Woodger grew up watching The Simpsons and daydreaming about making a living from doing what he loves—drawing and animating. “I’ve always loved drawing, but for a long time I just considered it a hobby and assumed you couldn’t make a living off it, so I focused my attention elsewhere,” he admitted in an interview with Medium.
It wasn’t until he was coming to the end of his A-Levels that he found out his college offered an Art Foundation course. “A free extra year of education doing just art and design, or into full time employment at the Golf Club I was working at? Seemed like a no-brainer so I enrolled and I’ve never looked back,” he recalls.
Now a freelance illustrator, animator, and icon designer living and working in London, his selected clients include Google, The New York Times, GQ, and The Washington Post. Projects with McDonalds and Samsung have seen him travel the globe to Japan and Taiwan respectively. In other words: he’s kind of a big deal.
Having developed a recognizable illustration style and retro aesthetic, his colorful characters are based around basic shapes and lines and make for a somewhat comical effect.
“I always struggle to find a good way of describing my work,” says Woodger, “I guess you could say it’s quite cartoon-like. I like to give my characters expressive faces and enjoy using humour in my illustrations, but the execution is quite neat, I like to use clean, tidy lines and symmetry, so in some ways I feels more a designer at times. It fits somewhere in between I think. “
But though simple, his work is nothing but simplistic. Show him some love on Instagram.
