For a certain period, Nina was drawing other people's characters. Fanart moves on social media and if you're building a following from scratch, it's a reasonable trade. The problem was that it kept giving her creative blocks. The more she drew for the algorithm, the less she had to say. At some point the calculation stopped making sense, and she started building something that was entirely hers.

Puri Puri Exitium began with three moodboards, each representing a different aesthetic she loved. Characters came out of those boards: Bonbon, Eden, and Coil, each with their own visual identity and personality, their own place in a world with lore behind it. What she didn't expect was how quickly people responded. The characters gained traction before anyone knew the backstory. The visual coherence was enough on its own.

That instinct, to build something with enough internal logic that it doesn't need explaining, runs through how Nina works. She started posting in 2015, spent years developing her practice in public, and in 2023 made the decision to archive almost everything and start over. The rebrand came through Inktober, a month of daily drawings in a completely new direction. What came out of it was the work she's known for now: dense with reference, rooted in early 2000s Japanese visual culture and old comic strips, and built around characters that feel like they've existed longer than they have.

How did you first get into making art?
I’ve always been passionate since I was a kid. My mom and my sister taught me a lot and overall my family always supported my love for art.

Do you see yourself as an illustrator, a designer, or a creator?
I call myself a creative factotum or a visual artist. I find it hard to label myself because I do many different things and I’m always eager to try new ones!

When did you decide this was something you wanted to pursue seriously?
I was coming home from my office work one day and felt like I lost my direction. I wasn't doing much art back then but people surrounding me already knew what they wanted to be. I felt like I was giving up the only thing that felt mine. After a few months, I decided to quit my job and pursue illustration.

What does a typical working session look like for you?
It really depends, everyday is different and carries different tasks, sometimes I would be filming content the whole day long, sometimes I would be sketching ideas, sometimes I would be set on a single illustration and other times I’ll be rushing the delivery of some design project! But I’m happy like that!

What tools do you work with most?
I always use procreate for my Illustrations, I would like to paint more in the future.

Your work seems to mix and mash a ton of different styles. What would you say makes it feel that way?
It’s the best way to create something unique, the more ingredients you use the more complex the taste will be. I love when people get my hidden references and easter eggs!

How would you describe your visual aesthetic to someone who's never seen your work?
I would say old comic strips combining with Japanese 2000’s culture.

Do you take inspiration from things outside of illustration/design? If so, what's a memorable example?
I constantly take pictures everywhere I go and often use them as references, I really like to observe architecture and nature.

Is there a specific era, medium, or visual world you keep returning to when you're looking for references?I really love 2000’s magazines, advertising, fashion, photography, and tech.

Alex Vargas's worlds are low poly. The characters move with a deliberate choppiness, nothing is reaching for realism, and yet something in them is deeply habitable. There's warmth in the light and a quiet humor running underneath it, and the combination produces the feeling that these places exist somewhere, that you've spent time in them before. His animations feel like playing Animal Crossing on a warm summer morning.

That feeling is built from the palette outward. Before a scene has geometry, before characters are in it, Vargas blocks in the world with rough shapes and puts the lighting in first. The orange he keeps returning to, the temperature of an afternoon through a window, all of it gets locked in before anything else is built. The warmth isn't a quality of the finished work. It's the first decision.

What makes it work is partly how much he's figured out how to do without. His style forgives choppy frames, limited movement, environments that are full of small objects rather than detailed ones. His computer was never powerful enough to do it any other way, and somewhere in there he found that the constraint was the point. Characters who feel real inside a world that makes no claim to realism. A place you want to be that couldn't actually exist.

I saw your first YouTube video posted back in 2022 called Rakook, and the description says you started animating in Blender that year. What pulled you to animating then, and what were you making before?

I never intended to be an animator going into college. I was on a path of architecture and also interactive art, like video game slash museum exhibit kind of stuff. I had a class called Immersive Experiences, which was literally making interactive art in Unity. To do that you use 3D models, so we got a little bit into Blender in that class. I was really bad at it obviously, but at the end of the class I had made a project that I really liked and I wanted to continue with it over the summer. I decided I wanted it to look prettier, so I decided to learn Blender. And as I was learning it, I realized that I enjoyed it a million times more than programming and trying to make games.

Rakook was kind of my first project ever and that's how I learned Blender. I had this idea of just wanting to make a raccoon cook. First I wanted to learn how to make a character, so I watched videos on that. Then I wanted him to move, so I watched a rigging tutorial. Then I wanted him to cook soup, which is liquid, so I learned how to do a liquid simulation. It was kind of an amalgamation of a lot of tutorials, and that's the best way to learn in my opinion.

You taught yourself Blender through that project. What tips would you give anyone learning Blender or getting into animation?

A lot of people want to learn those tools because they see things they like and they want to make stuff like that. And a lot of the time what I've seen happen is they'll follow one tutorial, then another tutorial, and they'll never really leave that tutorial phase. They'll always just depend on making stuff through tutorials. That's fine if you just want to pick it up casually or just learn the software, but if you only rely on tutorials, that's where people get stuck and never really progress.

If you really want to learn Blender, the best way is to have a goal. For me, I wanted to make a short film, and that's how I learned all the aspects of it. Whenever I got stuck, I'd look up a tutorial for that specific part and then keep going by myself until I got stuck again. If you have something that you want to make, that's always a better way to learn the tools. And you get rewarded because you get to make what you want to make. It's a lot more reassuring that way.

What artists inspired you to create 3D animations?

There was one artist I followed on social media who really encouraged me to get into it. Her name is Janice Lee, her tag is Janice Journal. We're actually pretty good friends now because she also lives in New York. I stumbled upon one of her videos and it was like a "my first five projects" kind of thing, and I thought they were really cute. I was like, wow, these are her first five, that means I could probably get good too, pretty quickly. She's definitely the one who got me into it.

A lot of people in your comments ask about your animation style, which has really popped off on social media. How would you describe it?

When I first started with this new style, it obviously wasn't my style in the beginning. But I've always liked low poly, video game aesthetics since I grew up with video games. When I first started I wanted to imitate that, so I wanted to do something like PS1, low poly, pixelated, lo-fi kind of aesthetics. Then I realized I also really liked warm lighting, and when you do PS1 aesthetics, lighting isn't usually a big part of that. You typically want your characters to not react to light. So I kind of just mixed both. Now what I have is more of a DS or 3DS feel, I think it's probably closer to those systems. But at the end of the day, if somebody calls my style low poly or PS1 or game-like graphics, I would never correct that because that's pretty much what I was going for.

Your aesthetic pulls a lot from Animal Crossing and that GameCube era of Nintendo games. What does that style do for you that more stylized or newer CG can't?

I've always loved the amount of personality those games have. One specific reference is Mega Man Legends, a PS1 game that I think looks incredible. It was the first piece of media where I noticed that instead of using bones to move the characters' mouths and eyes, they would just replace all of that with PNGs. Whenever they wanted the character to blink, they'd just put a blink PNG instead of actually moving and closing the eye. I just think that limitation and the amount of personality they were able to create with that was really charming. And honestly, part of it was that my computer was really weak and that approach is a lot easier for it to handle. But I always just thought it was cute. Limitation breeds something really beautiful, you know.

Danielle Taylor didn't want to study graphic design. She wanted fine arts, and when her parents pointed her elsewhere, she spent her freshman year of college with a grudge against the whole field and no particular desire to lose it.

What came next wasn't a conversion so much as a decision. She turned graphic design into an obsession specifically because she needed a reason to like it, and she worked at it until the reason showed up, which it did, slowly and then completely.

By the time she graduated with her BFA, she had moved through motion design, photography, videography, and 3D work, and she was building full worlds inside her graphics, complete with fake rules, invented credits, and lore that existed nowhere except inside the piece. She was already thinking like a creative director. None of it would have happened if she'd gotten what she asked for.

A lot of your work uses very committed color palettes. Do those color decisions come before or after you know what the piece is?

The color choices I use for a lot of my designs really depend on what the project is or what type of mood I'm feeling that day. For my personal concept designs, a lot of them are in blues and reds because I really love those colors the most. I don't have a specific reason, but if I was doing a K-pop concept, a lot of their designs are normally in red or blue hues and I try to stay consistent with that. So yeah, I just really like reds and blues and pinks.

At what point in the process do colors come in? Do you start with colors or do they come in later?

I actually start off with the typography first. I just start blocking in how I want the layout to look and then I do coloring last.

A lot of your work uses duotone and halftone to flatten the photography into something more graphic. What draws you to that approach over more photorealistic compositing?

I actually never realized that I used duotone and halftones. I guess I do a mixture of it. The main textures I use is grain. I really like those rough textures in my designs because they draw people in a lot more. At least they draw me in. I often really like how it feels, it grabs my attention a lot. And whenever I share with friends or with clients who like that style I normally do for my personal work, they often say, "Wow, this is really cool. I've never seen this before." So I've just stuck with that type of style.

What's your process? Run me through making a graphic from start to finish.

My process has developed a lot differently over the years. During school I would always start off with a sketch and then bring that sketch into Photoshop or Illustrator and start building out from there. But ever since I started the 365 day challenge about three years ago, I've been doing it so much every single day that I actually just start off in Photoshop without a sketch and start blocking in the pieces I'd like to have in the graphic and then build out from there.

I normally start with either the type treatment, just finding out what fonts I want to use, and then next I'll start with the actual graphic images, masking those out, putting in the shadows, putting in the different elements to build up more depth. And then afterwards I put in my gradient maps or my grains and all my texture layers. It just develops more and more into the final result.

David Momodu is a brand identity designer and poster artist based in Lagos. His work arrives fully formed before he opens the software. By the time he sits down, the atmosphere is already decided, the emotional tone set, the approximate weight of the type known. The gap between what he imagines and what ends up on screen is almost nothing.

He gets the ideas for his posters from stoic videos online and the Bible, each quote drawn from somewhere personal in him. Then he got a message saying one of his pieces had pulled them back from suicide. His first thought, he says, was that he had an idea for a new poster. That instinct, to turn meaning into work, is now inseparable from how he thinks about what the work is for. He wants people to see something with weight. Not another image moving through a feed, but something that stays.

Building a design career in Nigeria without a clear roadmap means learning to work around things most designers in other markets take for granted. Unreliable electricity, payment systems that don't reach you, no formal infrastructure for someone trying to make a name in poster design or experimental typography. David came up through all of it, largely alone, studying designers online, posting work that barely got attention, and slowly developing a practice that had no obvious precedent around him.

How did growing up in Nigeria shape the way you see things, before you even picked up design as a practice?

Yes. Nigeria has a great influence on how I see design. From the environment to the people. There’s a certain intensity to life here: the colors, noise, and street graffiti. I grew up surrounded by visual character. I think it also made me appreciate identity a lot more. Nigerian culture is very expressive and layered, and that pushed me towards work that feels emotional and human.

Has pursuing a creative career in Nigeria come with specific obstacles? What does the path actually look like?

Bruh, where do I even start? It's pretty difficult. Especially when you’re trying to build something independently. A lot of the path feels unstructured. There isn’t always a clear roadmap for creatives here, especially in fields like poster design or experimental typography, so most of the learning comes from self teaching, online communities, and constant trial and error.

Struggles with the internet, unreliable electricity, international payments systems. For me, the path looked very gradual. It was a lot of learning alone, studying designers online, experimenting constantly, posting work even when it barely got attention, and slowly refining a style over time. At the end of the day if you’re not resilient as a creative in Nigeria chances are you won’t make it.

Can you give us one specific thing you saw in Nigeria, something from the street or your neighborhood, that has influenced you?

Well the ones I can think of right now are the graffiti under the bridges in Agege and the Falomo bridge underpass. Of course there are many others. These are just the ones off the top of my head.