Today, British graphic designer Rian Hughes is known for his distinctive work with clients like New York Times Magazine, Mercury Records, The Guardian, Penguin Books, and many other recognizable names. What many of these clients may not know is that Hughes got his start toiling in the small press comic world, leaving behind a body of work that likewise includes collaborations with some of the industry’s biggest names.The artist’s work is instantly recognizable if you’ve seen even one piece by him. Bold-colors and exaggerated two-dimensional figures are two of the hallmarks of his work, becoming more noticeable in the early 1990s when he first began working with digital illustration on his Mac computer. His first comics work, Zit, was published between 1983 and 1984 and launched him into the British small press scene. Paul Gravett tapped Hughes as a contributor to his influential Escape magazine, published between 1983 and 1989. Hughes’s strips in the magazine included Norm and The Inheritors.Hughes served as the illustrator for two of comics megastar Grant Morrison’s early works. The first, Dan Dare, is an update of the classic British sci-fi hero, set against the background of 1980s British culture. The second, Really & Truly, was an alternative comic strip originally serialized in 2000 AD. Hughes’s most recent interior comics work up to this point is in the action-comedy Robo-Hunter series. After this, his design and advertising work, which he had been practicing since the beginning of his comics career, finally became a full-time pursuit.However, Hughes didn’t leave comics behind entirely, continuing to design comic book logos and covers, including those for Grant Morrison’s influential series The Invisibles and Flex Mentallo. As mentioned above, though, he’s also gone on to work for many big namesfor instance, he designed the animated safety film for Virgin Airlines.One of Hughes’s other passions is typography, a hobby he indulged by lettering his own comics. Since then, he’s designed many of his own fonts, some of them for specific commissions and others simply for his own amusement. A retrospective book called Ten Year Itch collects all of his font designs up through 2005. A collection of the majority of his comics work, Yesterday’s Tomorrows, is also available, including not only his Morrison collaborations, but also The Science Service (with John Freeman) and an adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s “Goldfish” (with writer Tom DeHaven). There alre also a number of books collecting lettering and design work from the 1960s and 1970san obvious inspiration for the talented designer.