Artsygamer

Here’s to wishing more games will go in original art directions instead of the standard "real world in polygons" art style Here’s a game that gives me hope for the future, at least with it’s concepts and hopes of following in the mighty footsteps of the originality in Planescape:

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Gamasutra has an interview with Moby Francke, art director on Valve’s Team Fortress 2. I love the emphasis on art direction:

You might think that, for a publisher, and for marketing people, it would be better to have an easily distinguishable art style.
MF: I think video games are at such infancy in terms of art style, actually developing it. We’re dealing with 4000 years, really, of art and conceptual design.
For it really not to be utilized, and for the industry to basically dwell in a certain type of genre which has been around the 1980s up to present time, it’s pretty much all they’re embracing.
It’s the same way, you have Star Wars and the original Stanley Kubrick movie 2001. And people embrace that genre of outer space, so to speak. And it’s continued to this very day. Hopefully people will wake up someday.

Couldn’t find his previous works or samples but here’s what the Valve team page has to say about him:

Moby Francke – Artist
Moby is a character designer for Half Life 2 and the art lead on Team Fortress 2. He brings to Valve academic fine art training with an emphasis in illustration. After graduating from the Academy of Art San Francisco, he worked at Lucas Arts as a conceptual designer, and taught figure painting at the Academy of Art SF. Hes won several prestigious awards, including 2 New York Society of Illustrators Competition Awards. He is originally from the small Caribbean island of St. Thomas, and enjoys the simple things of life.

I knew there was artistic vision and direction since I saw the focus on silhouettes and influences from classic comercial illustration:

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