Welcome to the dark, visually-compelling work of London-based director/designer Carl Burgess.

A former art director at digital agency Hi-ReS!, Burgess’ oeuvre is infused with black humour. False smiles, intense concentration and the disappointment of TV commercials and game shows are scrutinized, and stock footage of the perfect male form or an urban cityscape are distorted grotesquely. More abstract work mixes fleshy nubs, mercurial rainbow colours and scintillating flares of light to create unsettling digital art pieces.

In a digital age, Brighton-based Kyle Bean’s work is a striking anomaly: extraordinarily-detailed, all handmade, his pieces for department stores, magazines and brands are often a meditation on technology in our everyday lives, made in perishable materials like cardboard and paper.

Years of drawing and model-making as a youngster led to an illustration course at Brighton Unversity, when he met fellow Blinkartist David Wilson. His painstakingly-crafted degree show was a thought-provoking statement on the transience of our culture of throwaway technology. That included a representation of the evolution of mobile phones, with each smaller model fitting into the last, like a matryoshka doll.

Lernert & Sander are two dutch artists and friends who decided that working alone was getting boring and started collaborating on art related projects. Since their first video Chocolate Bunny they've been working on commercials, leaders, art movies, documentaries and installations. Their aim is to make simple and communicative works, that takes little note of the existing border between contemporary art and commercial projects.

Brooding, mysterious and moving suggestively between the abstract and the figurative, Lynn Fox's work blends analogue and digital to create intricate, richly organic work in moving image or stills.

Comprising Patrick Chen, Bastian Glassner and Christian McKenzie - who met studying architecture at University College London - Lynn Fox burst onto the music video scene with “Hayling” for FC Kahuna, in which alien fauna sensuously intertwine. They’ve since created striking CG/live action mash-ups in award-winning commercials and music videos for Björk, Maximo Park and Chris Clark, among others.

Combining illustration, music, graphic design, photography and moving image, Paris-based digital artists Pleix are a creative collective in the truest and purest sense.

“Geneviève Gauckler is a famous graphic designer and does a lot of wonderful print jobs and personal works,” says one seventh of Pleix, Erwin Charrier. “I work with a friend as Antimode, we mix photography with CG. Our musician Jean-Philippe Deslandes, aka Bleip, is about to release his second album. This openness is really crucial for us, as Pleix is a close team, we need to find backdoors to stay happy together.”

Having trained at various top Parisian animation schools including Supinfocom and ENSAD, and passing through the studio of French directing duo Kuntzel & Deygas as CG artists, the seven-strong team teamed up after “a memorable cheese and wine evening”, quickly making waves in the motion graphics world with “No” for musician Bleip.

Exploring the bleeding edge of CG creativity, directing duo Zeitguised’s extraordinary digital pieces are born of the brains of sculpture/fashion graduate Jamie Raap and Henrik Mauler, who comes from an engineering/architecture background.

Formed in 2001 to channel those common and disparate interests, the result is digital surrealism, manifested in beautiful CG. Their debut, Funkstörung “The Zoo”, is an eerily-rendered series of vehicles flickering in and out of reality, sliced, turned inside out and defying physics.

Spanning epic graphic novel, manga and gothic futurist-styled characters, Ben Hibon’s inventive characters and worlds are an eclectic, imaginative and stylish mix.

That blend has been expressed across an extraordinary range of media, with Hibon comfortable working on everything from feature films to commercials and from illustration to videogame sequences. Among other projects, Hibon has directed animated vignettes for Japanese director Sakichi Sato’s horror/comedy “Tokyo Zombie” and epic fantasy battle scenes to promote PlayStation 3 game “Heavenly Sword”.

Patience, it is said, is a virtue, and mixing that with painstaking attention to detail and inventive craft skills has seen Somerset-raised David Wilson justly rewarded.

Signed to Blinkink just eight months after graduating, his stunning debut for folk artist Moray McLaren “We Got Time”, is a beautiful meditation on life cycles and nature red in tooth and claw. He scooped Best New Director at the MVAs in 2009 and featured in Boards' Directors to Watch and Dazed & Confused magazine the same year.

Subsequent eclectic, inventive videos for We Have Band and Little Boots have secured his place as one of the most exciting directors working, spanning genres and media to fine effect.

With a background in fine art and a day job as a copywriter, it’s little wonder that London-based Dave Cornmell’s illustrations are beautifully-drawn tableaux of razor-sharp humour.

Cornmell cites cartoonists like The Guardian’s Steve Bell, and the Perry Bible Fellowship’s Nicholas Gurewitch as inspiration, and that classic tradition comes through in work that juxtaposes simple, seemingly innocent line drawings to deliciously subversive content.

Malmo-based Kristofer Strom is a polycreative, an endlessly inventive illustrator, sculptor, musician, painter and animator, whose brain never stops looking for new outlets for his creative noodling.

He burst into the animation consciousness with “Hitchikers Choice” for Minilogue, in which cutesy fauna playfully twist and transform on a whiteboard. The short clocked up over three million YouTube views, featured in shots, and been reworked to rebrand Carphone Warehouse. Strom even sculpted hordes of clay critters for the album’s cover art.