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Polka Folks

Polka Folks

Mother Volcano
May 7, 2017
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The Polka Folks is an open-ended experimental project on micro-portraiture that goes on and on.
They are based on tight constraints we have given ourselves to see how for how long we can come up with new and surprising ones. We usually work in series but occasionally we make one or two in reference to something that is going on in our studio or in the world.
We have a few ideas about how the project might evolve but we haven't decided on nothing yet. At the moment we are publishing them one by one or series by series on a dedicated Instagram account: https://www.instagram.com/polkafolks/



The Polka Folks are a spinoff of a client project we had where we had to represent online shoppers as dot sized people running around. We had a lot of positive feedback and thought the dot sized people were too good to be confined to one single project so we decided to evolve them and let them loose out on the web. They deserved to be a project on its own, to have their own identity.


We used Affinity Designer. We set up a grid and defined a few rules such as colour schemes, face shapes, not having a mouth etc. Then within those constraints we push our creativity and try to come up with as many different and surprising characters as we can. We usually work in series eg. Nerds, Vikings, Punks, Halloween, etc.






We have had a very positive response and the followers on the Polka Folks instagram account is steadily growing. Recently we had a student in the Phillipines who credit Polka Folks as the inspiration for her project, which is awesome!

Follow them on Instagram and don't be shy to suggest ideas for new Polka Folks series.

Mother Volcano

We are a creative studio that specialises in illustration based communication, content and digital products.

We bring together storytelling, animation, interaction design and code to create beautiful, relevant and exciting work that takes you further.

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