Artist Feature
Floro Dery
The uncredited architect of how Transformers look. He designed the G1 cartoon and the 1986 movie, and his work is the one you basically cannot own.
- Active
- 1980s
- Based
- Philippines
- Key Transformers work
- G1 cartoon lead designer; The Transformers: The Movie (1986)
- Also known for
- Marvel newspaper strips, Amazing Spider-Man
The blueprints for the cartoon
Floro Dery is the most influential artist on this list and the least known by name. The Filipino designer served as the lead character and model designer for the original G1 cartoon and the 1986 animated movie, which means he drew the blueprints that every animated Transformer descends from.
The look of the show
If you can picture the show, you are picturing Dery's work: the proportions, the faces, the way the Decepticon jets read on screen, and the new cast introduced in the movie. His production designs defined the look so completely that the franchise has spent forty years referring back to them.
Selected Transformers art
A wall of published work. Click any image to enlarge. Sources credited per image; on build we re-host into our own archive.
Collecting his originals
His Transformers work was studio-owned production art, never made for sale, and it effectively never reaches auction. The scarcity is the story.
Legacy
The man who designed the cartoon left almost nothing a collector can buy. Dery shaped how a generation pictures Transformers, and then quietly disappeared from the credits.