Meet Toms Stals – Mix Knowledge with a Gut Feeling

Our team decided to interview the most intriguing creators on good design and test their works with the Attention Insight platform. It predicts how user’s attention distributes in design. We hope these short talks will inspire you and give some useful insights on catchy design. Enjoy!

Meet Tom Stals, a Graphic Designer from Copenhagen, Denmark. His main focus of work is branding & logo design, illustration, and web design. Let’s check out his work, test it with AI, and hear about what inspires Toms create it.

Tom’s work is colorful yet subtle; that makes it attractive. He creates illustrative information design. Flat illustration is a consistent style that dominates in his work: informative minimalist design that eases usability by helping a user to grasp any content in a simple way. His illustrations are primarily two-dimensional, with clean, simplified objects, containing vast amounts of white space.

Themes are: online business, customer support, conversion optimization.

Toms holds a broad collection of informative stock illustration. He has created single vector illustrations and sets. Toms creates both, client commission and stock images to be used upon request.

What’s your favorite project you’ve ever done and why?

My favorite project is always the one I’m working on at that moment, as it gets me excited, and it’s what pushes me out of bed in the morning. Of course, some projects are more challenging and exciting than others, but there’s always something to learn from, nonetheless you’d like to work on it in the future, or not. Maybe someday, when I am old and not anymore in the industry, I’ll look back and will reflect on all the projects I’ve worked on; although usually, I like to look at what’s ahead of me instead of what’s in the past. To pick out a few of my favorite illustrative pieces, Web Surfer and Online Shopping were the ones I had the most fun working on.

What do you base your design decisions on?

For me, it’s a good mix of my personal experience and what fits the needs and values of a particular industry. I like Steve Jobs’ quote, “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” I think there is a time and place for analytics and user data, but it should also be combined with your own professional knowledge and “gut” feeling.

People don't know what they want until you show it to them.

Steve Jobs

How do you handle a situation when you disagree with the client?

In the case of different opinions, I think it’s important to see other sides’ points of view. There might be some good reasons why they are particularly feeling this way. When you are working on a project for a long time, you start to have some blind spots or might miss some inconsistencies, which could be pointed out by someone looking at your work with a fresh eye. If there are apparent drawbacks in the client’s proposed change, I would try to find similar cases used in the competitor’s solution that clearly add value and have been realized in a similar way to my proposal. Shortly, listening and understanding clients’ perspectives is the key.