When I spoke to illustrator Shaun Hill about Bat Butt for the blog two months ago, he said something about collaborating with other artists on his zines that stuck with me. Shaun told me that “Out of every three people that you ask for work, two will say yes and only one will send you work.” Those are the ones who are hungry to get their work out there, to follow through on their creative urges, and to build collaborative bonds. Those are the ones that submitted artwork for the Duck Duck Goose T-Shirt Competition in June this year. This type of creative temperament is exactly what we intended to illuminate through our competition, which is why it made us even more excited that our winner, Mas-Ud Hartley, and runner-up, Harry Zeederberg, are both young and at the start of their careers. I sat down with both of them to double-check whether the future of design is genuinely bright, or whether we have been fooled by two superb competition submissions. The result was delightfully promising.

Mas-Ud is 21 years old and a graphic design student at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology. Until he started his course, he told me, he wasn’t aware of the community of illustrators in Cape Town making a living off drawing. Mas-Ud was artistically inclined from a ripe age, though, drawing all the subject matter that every little boy would want to draw (sharks and dinosaurs, cool boy stuff), but when he discovered Spiderman, his life changed forever. He doesn’t recall anyone in particular exposing him to the fictional universe of superheroes, but his infatuation with the movies naturally turned into an addiction to comics, fueled by his working single mother to keep him busy. Her strategy worked. Mas-Ud reckons that he’s spent more time in his life looking at and illustrating comic book characters than he’s spent in the bathroom. Even though that’s a sizable portion of a lifetime, I still doubt the accuracy of his estimation. While he still illustrates Spiderman on occasion, Mas-Ud’s range of characters has widened as his taste ventured into other cartoons and anime.

As a boy, he would copy his drawings from reference images and long for originality. Now, however, with the characters and their personalities burnt into his corneas and alive in his mind, he can imagine and draw them in any pose that he chooses for them to take. According to Mas-Ud, the characters have impacted his subconscious to the point where he sees his surroundings through a fictionally tinted lens. One evening, as Mas-Ud reflected on his daily taxi commute home from town to Surrey Estate, the roar of the gaatjie suddenly sounded very similar to that of Godzilla. The result was Gaatjiezilla, a giant, screaming, blinged-up, cash-wielding, tracksuit-wearing hybrid between the fictional creature and the real-life taxi conductor. Keen to get his work out there, Mas-Ud sent in his illustration to our competition, which his friend made him aware of. Besides this bursting creative desire and the financial incentive, says Mas-Ud, one of the most exciting parts of the competition was the connection that he felt with the designers that he discovered by seeing other entries, who have stoked a fire in him to be more confident about the possibilities of a future in graphic design.

One of those designers was 24-year-old runner-up Harry Zeederberg, who was spurred on to submit an entry by his new Rave Growl colleague, Shaun Hill himself. Harry had already been at the illustration and animation studio for three years, having joined almost straight after graduating from Cape Town Creative Academy. During his time in college, his animation work caught the eye of a lecturer, who would end up becoming a friend and help him find a place in the graphic design industry. “Sometimes you make your own luck, I guess” said Harry in reference to finding himself working at Rave Growl. Besides being impressed with his portfolio, I can imagine that the company was also struck by his eagerness to get to work. With Shaun’s wisdom that I illuminated earlier in mind, it makes complete sense for the two of them to be sharing a desk. Harry had actually reached out to Shaun on Instagram trying to make friends with him long before he joined the team, but to no avail. Now, however, they’re almost inseparable, walking around town during their lunch breaks in pack formation.

Harry has always enjoyed roaming the streets, though. Much like Mas-Ud’s illustration, Harry’s “Magic is Everywhere” design resulted from applying his aesthetic sensibilities to the scenery of his daily commute. In his illustration, ordinary and taken-for-granted eccentricities of the City Bowl’s street life are reimagined in a mysterious, spooky, and magic reality. While he claims to still be searching for his own signature illustration style and is simply trying to draw as much as he can, Harry has always been attracted to the spooks. As a kid, he was heavily influenced by his two brothers, respectively 11 and 13 years older than him, that he grew up with in Kommetjie and watched fight dragons and skeletons as wizards in fantasy video games. One of them, particularly, would draw “skulls and demons putting knives in their stomachs and stuff” and read visceral comic books. This early desensitisation to the macabre allowed him to see the humour in spooky stuff. Citing Nosferatu, Dracula’s harrowingly unsexy and decrepit vampire cousin, as an accurate example of his taste, Harry said “He’s rad. He’s also funny.”

Funnily enough, Harry’s psychiatrist grandfather used to monitor censorship for film and television. According to Harry, when the first Exorcist movie came out, his grandad said that once people saw it, they wouldn’t be able to unsee it. That’s why, when Harry told me that he’s tired of drawing “magical spooky stuff,” I doubted whether he would ever be able to unsee it.

Both of our award winners are products of the imagery that they consumed as children. Both are also victims to an aggressive creativity, one of the most unwavering and infectious bugs to contract, which they will probably carry for the rest of their lives and probably transmit to others as it was transmitted to them. We hope they never stop, for the sake of the country’s and the world’s future design landscape. That’s why we incentivised them to keep going.

You can do the same by shopping their T-shirts in-store at 120 Bree Street and online at duckduckgoosestore.com from this week onwards. Units are limited, so move fast.