Burger trees, spying fruit and flying taxis: the digital clay world of Daniel Jurman

If you're old enough to remember the 1990s, you may recall the strange little animated bumpers MTV used to drop in between its shows. They rarely made any sense, but worked brilliantly to keep you engaged with the channel.

These clips were uniformly short, experimental and surreal. And if you think "Well, I've seen that 100 times, on channels like E4" then you'd be right. But MTV were the first to go there, and at the time, the effect was profound for the music channel's predominantly youthful audience.

In an era when TV idents were typically staid and corporate, the typical reaction to MTV's bizarre clips was: "What the heck are these guys on?"Viewers were bemused and delighted in equal measure.

Today, New York illustrator and animator Daniel Jurman draws great inspiration from the weird little clips in his own work.

"Those mysterious animated five-second bumpers on MTV that appeared between Beavis and Butt-Head and Headbangers Ball... those are 1000% my thing," he tells us. And the moment you see his own animations, you can see the connection straight away.

We share seven of them on this page. None last more than a few seconds, but they get a lot done in that compressed time.

A fridge in trainers jogs on a treadmill (of course it does). A taxi hovers over a city skyline at dusk. A row of burgers grows on a tree, while two watering cans keep them topped up. Using something akin to digital clay, everything looks as if it's been pinched into shape by hand, with lumps and creases left in.

It's a far cry from the kind of bland polish you might expect from CG animation. Indeed, it feels more like the handmade feel of stop motion, even though it was built entirely from pixels. Creative Review dubbed his style "technostalgia", and that works for me.

Design to illustration

Daniel was born in New York and studied graphic design upstate, before moving into illustration during the pandemic. He went freelance in 2022 and has since worked with clients including Apple, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Economist, Wired and Texas Monthly. He's represented by Snyder in North America and the UK.

"My inspirations stem from 70s/80s claymation, any vintage advertising that involved set design and many things from the 1990s, the decade of my childhood," he explains.

That love of vintage creativity runs through his work, as does a knack for getting one idea across in a super-brief sequence. In one, for example, the apples and oranges on a market stall pop open to reveal a microphone, a satellite dish and a periscope with a roving eye.

In another, a US flag stands on spindly legs, trying to catch the stars that fall off it. Elsewhere, a desktop computer sprouts arms to type, answer the phone and aim a paper plane, all at once, as if it's the most natural thing in the world.

It's all very silly, but crucially, it's also very cleverly made. And just like those MTV bumpers, once it ends, you want to watch it all over again.