Back at the beginning of this research project, one of the areas I wanted to explore was the way that illustrators work with designers in the industry. alternatively, how those two skill sets work together if they are being covered by one person and if a leaning towards one skill over another was beneficial or had any impact of work flow.
So I spoke to a few working designers to discuss their practise and approach to work. The first was Matt Emmins, a Graphic Designer working for himself and at the agency Other Media in London.
Matt discusses that, like me, he can “draw and I doodle all the time, but like I don't necessarily have a illustrative style”. Using a reference image, he could produce something in a specific illustrative style. This is something I’ve come across in my work also, where I’ve needed to make something illustrative for a client, be it a greetings card or some more corporate illustration. I’ve researched the type of work I want to replicate, and then used that as a jumping off point to make more work. But as Matt says, this can be very time consuming.
When asking about how designers and illustrators interact with each other on the projects, Matt explains that it is usually the case that he, or the project leader, will wire frame out sites of pitch decks and leave space where they want an illustration. Matt or the project leader would then brief someone, or themselves, on the specific requirements for that illustration. This implies a hierarchy of ownership and requirements in each project, and it could be said that graphic designers sit above illustrators in this way. They decide where things are going to be in the layout or the artwork, and then asking the illustrators to produce work that fits within that framework.
Another interesting point raised in this briefing process that I would not have thought about before is the idea of a guideline for the illustrator to stick to in regards to line weight, colour and style. It’s interesting to think about how much you can brief and dictate to someone who probably has their own style, but may not be able to stick to it completely if there are hard and fast rules about how and what to draw. This makes me think that maybe it is advantageous to not have a predetermined style that you can’t deviate from as this may hinder you in producing the type of work required for the brief.
I think the real take away from this conversation, is similar to the conversation I’ve had with Darren Tate and read in a number of books; Illustration is something that illustrators do every day and always have done. And when thinking about positionality of designs “vs” illustrators or how they work together, I design every day and my work means I think about designs and ways of designing every day.
It makes me think about fitness video I saw once on TikTok by a fitness creator James Smith. In it, Smith talks about the ‘Swimmer’s Body Illusion’, a fallacy in which people think they should start swimming to get in shape because all swimmers are in shape. However the truth is that “Swimmers don’t look the way they do because they swim, they swim because they look the way they do” (Smith, 2022). Meaning people who are predisposed to swim, have swimmers bodies, are therefore good at swimming. Being good at swimming makes you want to swim more and so you become a swimmer!
In the same way, people who are good at drawing, draw more, get work drawing and have success drawing and therefore, don’t move into other skills. The same could be said for designers. I used to draw as a child and student. But then I began to take pictures, I started designing and I had success in meant illustration wasn’t something I had time for alongside that. I guess everyone only has so many hours in the day and only so much RAM in their heads to work on certain things at once. This conversation was the first time where I thought it might be a good thing to not have a specific style or pigeon hole yourself to much, as this allows a designer or illustrator to be more flexible across all projects.