The creative powerhouse from one of Europe’s design hotspots with a growing reputation for cutting edge urban flavored art

Karoly Kiralyfalvi, aka Drez, may only be 25 years old, but he’s a designer with his fingers in a lot of pies.

Based in the European design hotspot of Budapest, Karoly runs a bewildering array of websites that showcase his work in the fields of design, typography, logos and branding, clothing, street art and plain old illustration.

Karoly says he first got bitten by the graphic design bug in the late 90s and benefited from an extremely creative family background, plus a father who was switched on to early versions of Photoshop.

“My father was the main influence in my interest in creative software. He told me how to use Photoshop - that was a really big thing for me and, I do believe the years I was learning to use it were the most important times in my creative career,” he says.

From literally learning the ropes at his fathers knee, Karoly is now sitting on a growing reputation for cutting edge digital art which has seen him produce work for the likes of Audi, clothing label Carhartt and skateboarding brand Creation. He’s also worked as a layout artist for a Hungarian lifestyle magazine and paid his dues at a local graphic design company called Solid.

With so much going on – from corporate design work to the odd spot of graffiti, sticker and paste-up art – its no wonder Karoly has remained a loyal user of Adobe software for so long.

“Photoshop is a constantly-running program on my Mac. I use it every minute, mainly for image-retouch, vector graphics reworking, pathing and millions of other things. I also use Illustrator a lot, at the moment the CS2 version, though I can’t wait to see the new CS3 version” he says.

With Adobe software running on his Mac and a thousand and one projects on the go at one time, how does Karoly approach each piece of work and still keep his style fresh?

“From the brief to the final work, the whole process is dependent upon the clients,” Karoly says. “I ask the client what they want and make some sketches based on that. Then we continue with one of these designs until the final graphics. I usually don't do pencil sketches, but start to collect some images from the internet and vectors from my hard disks. During the preparation process, I'm trying to think hard and right about the layouts and possibilities,” he says.

With that part of the creative process out of the way, Karoly then moves his designs into Photoshop and Illustrator and begins to add his own touches and ideas.

“I try not to use too many programs,” he says. “so I only use the most necessary. With Photoshop and Illustrator I can do anything I need in 90 per cent of my work. It may sounds unbelievable, but it's so easy on OSX. What I really love in Creative Suite is the great ability of handling vector objects, that is really important for me. The friendship between Illustrator files and Photoshop is really nice.”

www.extraverage.net
www.drezign.hu
www.logikwear.com

We would like to hear what you think about this article, use our contact form to let us know.