Do you know what makes a design good?

Is it merely an opinion, or is there something more to it? Breaking design down seems like such an abstract thing. Even the designers who are able to create thought-provoking work seem purely talented and have natural abilities that can’t really be nailed down to a process. But what if there were principles that captured why design and art worked the way that they do?

There are many beautiful designs that have been created on both a conscious and unconscious level. The downside of a designer continuing to create on an unconscious level is that the decisions they make appear somewhat random. For example, think if you were to ask a pilot why they clicked a few switches and they answered, “It just feels like the right switches to me,” rather than, “I need to adjust the wings to reduce wind drag.” As a passenger, the second would make us feel safer and confident in the pilot’s abilities.

There is a real power that comes from being able to identify and speak to what makes your design meaningful. In the story of the Joshua Tree (Sidebar) we learn that once you recognize and understand something, it unlocks a new level of perception. In this article we’ll take a look at some principles that make the aesthetics of design attractive to people, and explanations on why they do. The more you become conscious of how design works the better you are able to communicate and judge design decisions.

“Many years ago I received a tree identification book for Christmas. The first tree in the book was the Joshua tree because it took only two clues to identify it. Now the Joshua tree is a really weird-looking tree and I looked at that picture and said to myself, ”Oh, we don’t have that kind of tree in Northern California. That is a weird-looking tree. I would know if I saw that tree, and I’ve never seen one before.”

So I took my book and went outside. I had lived in that house for thirteen years, and I had never seen a Joshua tree. I took a walk around the block, and there must have been a sale at the nursery when everyone was landscaping their new homes — at least 80 percent of the homes had Joshua trees in the front yards. And I had never seen one before. Once I was conscious of the tree, once I could name it, I saw it everywhere. Which is exactly my point. Once you can name something, you’re conscious of it. You have power over it. You own it. You’re in control.”

Hello, I’m Your Brain

The Principles of Aesthetic Experience

Knowledge Is Power

Increasing Innovation with Hack Nights

When was the last time that the thought of a side project made you excited?

Paper Napkins

What is a hack night?

A “Hack Night” is time set aside to experiment, but with a group of like-minded people or coworkers. Pick one night out of the week and stay late. In this extra time, get organized and plan your attack for getting your hobby project off the ground. Even just an hour past the sound of the factory whistle is enough to be productive. Two hours after work is enough to get you a basic plan and the beginnings of something special. Three hours… well you get the idea. The more time devoted to a side project, the more that can be accomplished. The point is that time can be made outside of work but within the confines of the workplace. Come up with a good idea and execute it with your workmates within the time that has been set aside for your idea.

Design Informer

The Process Behind Good Illustration – According to a Young Illustrator (Part III)

by Natalie Sklobovskaya for DesignInformer

Good Process and Good Design (Continued)

In Part II I started a list of some personal process-oriented thoughts on illustration—more specifically about some ways to help broaden the creative process and make its execution more effective. In this Part III, I’ll wrap up the list in the same vein as Part II’s, with a few more of my thoughts on the subject.

Once again, while I hope these tips strike the right chord with readers from all creative fields and levels, I share them partially because many of them are still so freshly new in my head, and I can recall vividly their having planted themselves there during my time as a student. That said, there’s plenty more learning to be done on my end as well, and I invite you to share your responses and your own additions to the list in the comments, no matter what corner of the creative world you are from.

Enjoy, and a special thanks to returning readers from Parts One and Two!

Part III: A Few More Tips and Tricks

Don’t be in a hurry to use the computer.

Detail of illustration by J.C. Leyendecker.

A finished and good illustration doesn’t at all mean it was done in Photoshop or Illustrator and polished to pixel-perfection! Take a look at J. C. Leyendecker (illustration on left) and Norman Rockwell’s work and all those greats earlier in the centuries when we didn’t have Adobe or Google — (…what?). They didn’t have the convenience of unlimited colors a click away and the ability to mask and smudge and whatnot. They had more limitations, and when you design/draw under limitation, your design is usually stronger because you have to do more with what you have.

Also, digital tools give you too much control — like going out into the world, many of your best ideas are unreachable unless you stumble upon them through experimentation. And, it is much easier to experiment when you let yourself feel out of control with some hands-on media, and not RGB values and digital brushes where you know exactly what you will get and can Ctrl/Cmd+Z out of everything at any time.

So! Pull out your acrylics/colored pencils/watercolors/stencil/pencil/cardboard debris/copic markers and just pretend that’s all you had (pssst… you can always scan it in and touch it up in Photoshop later ). There’s something you will get out of those tools that you could never get out of working digitally, and that just might be what your image would work really freaking good with.

…As one last vote for traditional media, it has so much more heart. There’s a reason mankind’s appreciation of fine art emerged in it!

Ask for feedback — all the time.

Is this you (the girl, that is)? I know it’s certainly me sometimes, though thankfully it’s gotten better lately. But if I could go back in time, I’d beat myself over the head for missing out on such a tremendous untapped resource every time I did this!

Of course you know what you’re drawing, and that the orb-like thing in the corner symbolizes a microcosmic Earth, and that the colors on the guy’s glove and the pattern on the scarf are supposed to reference the Croatian flag. That could very well be the staple of your illustration, and that’s good that you know what you have in mind — but does it come through? Would someone who was not in your head when you conceived this idea know it from looking at it?

In fine art, this is sometimes not a necessary step — for instance, Monet didn’t need anyone to attest to the fact that his haystacks were indeed his visual impression of them. The effect that a piece of fine art has on its viewer is of course certainly a factor, but in illustration this communication is an absolute necessity.

So gather your friends and take them seriously, even if they don’t have an artistic bone in their body! Because what they do have are eyes, and they’re eyes that aren’t yours, at that, and that’s all you need. Show them what you’re working on, and — don’t tell them first! — ask them what they think the picture is about. What they notice first. What part is most evocative to them. If their answers don’t match up with your intentions, figure out what it was that led them to draw the wrong conclusions, and what adjustments you should make to your picture so the hierarchy and message is corrected.

Having artsy-inclined friends here is helpful, since unlike non-artists, they very often can quite literally point you in a direction for what to fix!

Use references.

Cartooning is about abstraction; illustration is about information.

My professor John Hendrix

Ever wonder how those graphically-realistic graphic novels look so… realistic? And yet stylized? It’s not that the artist just naturally knows how to draw everything and know where all the shadows fall and where every line on every character’s face goes (though they sure make it look like they do, and sometimes they actually know a very impressive amount). It’s that they’ve studied and used extensive references and consciously appropriated and communicated the visual information.

Remember, an illustration doesn’t have to be hard-core realistic — accurate visual information can be delivered even through a stylized drawing. But, incorrect information can be very distracting, and, as we already know, the less distracting material, the better. (Which is where experience and artistic skill are incredibly important.)

Fish by Gregory Mone,
cover illustration by Jake Parker.

A case study, as an example: there is this great blog post by illustrator Jake Parker which describes in words (and excellent pictures!) his process of creating book cover art. He started with a thumbnail, and ended up with a gorgeous digital illustration, but not without consulting real life for guidance. Studying a model ship for details on its form and moving parts (feel free to forgo this step if you’re a ship construction wiz), taking a picture of his son standing on a chair to get the boy’s legs and feet just right, etc. Not even the pros know nature, the physics of light, etc. so intimately that they can reproduce it on call! (Though, the more you know the better.)

…Well, except maybe Leonardo Da Vinci, I take off my hat to him. But he was so excellent at his art precisely because he respected nature enough to spend his life studying it and drawing his inspiration from it. And if Leonardo isn’t too cool for nature, none of us are.

Take breaks.

I know I’m the kind of person who’ll sit down and grind away at a drawing for 15-20 hours straight, and let me tell you, that’s not the way to go. I will hang my head in shame that I am still guilty of this on occasion.

1. You will actually save yourself time by taking breaks, since your eye will get drastically less perceptive the more you stare at your work. The keenness of your visual attention will drop by a huge margin, and thus, your drawing will take longer, or turn out worse. (Ever gone back to an old doodle that you thought looked fine only to cringe and think, Crikey, how did I draw that so deformedly?)
2. You run a high risk of getting discouraged or running into artist’s block as your brain gets less acute (obtuse?) as you work, too!
3. The artistic process happens everywhere — and often not being visually accosted with what you’re working on is what will generate a really revolutionary idea in you.

So. I know you’re excited about your drawing, but take a breather! Put your stylus/pencil/whatever down and go for a walk. …Don’t forget your camera/sketchbook, though.

Think big — small will come.

It’s very hard to see the whole picture while you’re scribbling lines here and there, and it’s the whole picture that’s going to be doing the work later. So, put down your pencil occasionally and just take a few minutes to look at what you did — evaluate the hierarchy, the mood, the balance, the composition, etc.

Some tips that I found help:

1. Always mock up thumbnails first. Even if you’re in the coloring stage, make “color thumbnails.” (thumbnails of your drawing with rough colors blotted in) Your eye can see things much easier when it has everything in its field of vision.
2. This may be a strange personal regimen, but before you start thinking about color, show your pencil sketch some love. Get visual references, use a ruler, get a nice clean sheet of paper (if you have to), go over the lines in Photoshop, etc. — do whatever you have to do make a nice clean drawing. Spending time on getting the sketch clean and right has saved me inordinate time and frustration later so many times I can’t ever bring myself to move on unless I have completed this stage in its entirety. Even if you don’t think the line work will be a prominent element in your final piece, do this anyway. It’ll force you define a lot of what your piece will have in it before you go any further, and point out potential problem areas before you get too deep into your process.
3. Remember how smart your eye is — it will fill in information, correct imperfections, etc. and you won’t even notice that the guy you’re drawing has his head skewed 30 degrees northeast. So, if you’re working digitally, take advantage of those Transform functions and just try flipping your drawing horizontally. It will immediately point out bad angles, odd skews of lines, asymmetries you never noticed before, etc. You’ll be amazed! If you’re working traditionally, just hold up your drawing to a mirror. If neither of those are available, remember to take breaks so you can look at it with a fresh eye.
4. Blow up the size and work larger than you want the final product to be (just pretend you had to make it that big!) When you scale it down later, you’ll hide imperfections but keep the high resolution of detail you ended up creating in there.

Save new versions of your files periodically.

One of my own process trails, for one illustration.

…And by “periodically” I mean all the time. (If you have a document open in Photoshop right now, stop reading this article and go save a backup copy of it.) Even if you just do a quick Save As “Birdhouse_2.psd” and then “Birdhouse_3.psd” later, etc. Right now. This way you’ll have something to fall back to if something goes wrong with your file (which will happen when you least want it to) or you discovered you ran off in a direction that wasn’t that great and want to backtrack a bit.

The screenshot of my own process trail on the left might be a slightly over-the-top example, but I was terrified of losing what I had done…

Another bonus to this is that you’ll also automatically generate a process trail to easily look back through the versions of the work you saved.

Oh, speaking of…

Keep a paper trail of your process.

This is 100% for you, unless you care to share it, and I can’t stress its importance enough. I severely underestimated process-documenting until very recently, and I never realized how much you can learn just from examining how you work.

1. Look at it critically and try to identify common rut points in your process
2. … and things you tend to do the same way (good places to experiment later)
3. Note techniques that worked and that didn’t work, and how you resolved them.
4. Study how you get from one step to the next.
5. Study your strengths but also your limitations. That last one is unbelievably important—the design world is so heavily focused on selling oneself that we often forget how important it is to verbalize our weaknesses, too! How else would we know where to get better, how to evaluate our work, or know when we might not be the best person for the job?

Plus, it’s kind of like watching a time-lapse video of a building being built — looking back on your process is just really fun!

Build up skills.

This might sound a bit out of place for an article that’s all about democratizing illustration, but I thought it would be a nice (if more serious) closing note.

The image carries the bulk of the communicative burden in illustration, whereas in “design” the burden can be split up between image, typography, abstract elements, etc. Bad design decisions will hurt the illustration in almost all cases, and certainly not all illustrations need a skilled figure painter to pull them off. But some will. And, especially if you’re just starting out, the best favor you can do yourself right now is build up those skills so you have no barriers later.

I read an article recently by the Dungeons & Dragons art director Jon Schindehette, titled What do I look for in a portfolio. In it, he summarized what skills he looks for illustration portfolios to demonstrate, and it moved me to ponder just how important strong artistic skills are to the field. Even in this article series, I’ve seemingly written so much about how design skills are so much more important to illustration than “art skills” and how “art” is a big no-no, so what gives?

Design Informer reader Adit Gupta left a comment on Part II of this series, regarding the importance of understanding the nature and direction of light in illustration. I did not include an individual discussion of light, perspective, etc. in these articles until now because they’re part of a whole separate beast: the mechanics of art and artistic skill that, while usually cannot be effective illustration in and of themselves, are inordinately important to the success of the best ones out there.

So what are these skills?

General skills required to provide consistent quality.

…wrote Jon. That’s all that stuff you learn in drawing class that many of us students swore we’d never need again once we’d get Adobe Illustrator under our fingers, and vectors, and… digital, and stuff!

It’s understanding the basics of anatomy, light, perspective, motion, artistic mediums, et cetera. Visual research (as discussed above) will of course be necessary to make sure you have everything accurate for your piece, but the more you know right off the bat, the less of a barrier you will have between your idea in your head and putting it down on paper.

And it’s not to say that each illustration must show a mastery of perspective, light, anatomy, various mediums and other visual knowledge, else it’s not impressive (illustration, like design, must have content). It’s just that some illustrations WILL need them and will suffer without them. Whether the mood and message is hurt because the colors and light aren’t right, or the story isn’t conveyed because poor understanding of anatomy affects the body language of the figure, the list can go on and on.

You can find a niche in illustration without having these skills, but if you have them, you’ll be a stronger illustrator for it.

You could say, perhaps, this is where illustration separates from good ol’ basic design principles a little bit and joins right back up with “art.” Since image is king here and images are inherently made by incarnating an idea in an artistic medium, illustration embraces some of the same things that make even the finest of fine art tick.

But that’s beyond the scope of this article.

Design Informer

The Process Behind Good Illustration – According to a Young Illustrator (Part II)

by Natalie Sklobovskaya for DesignInformer

Good Process and Good Design

In Part I we skimmed the surface on a few points regarding when an image becomes an illustration. But, of course, this knowledge isn’t very useful if we don’t know how to apply it to our work when the pencil hits the paper! Or, stylus hits the tablet, whatever it is you do.

It’s easy to think there’s no way you can make anything look good because you don’t know how to use Adobe Illustrator, or can’t draw people worth beans, etc. And if that’s your concern, don’t worry one bit — skill-related knowledge is nothing that can’t be built up with practice and time. Those that have natural gifts will get there faster, but the doors are closed to no one. There are, however, staples to illustration that have nothing to do with how good you are at drawing or using Photoshop — they transcend into the realm of good process and good design, and I’ve believed that studying illustration is much more about this than about the former.

In this second part of the article, I’d like to share some of these practices that have been invaluable to me as an illustration student, and ones I think I will carry with me for a long time to come.

Without further ado…

Part II: So how do we do it?

Draw actively.

If it’s not distracting, add it. If it’s not necessary, remove it.

…And this is why it can take a very long time! In the end the goal is to get your illustration down to a point when as much as possible of what’s in it (people, their actions, props, setting, shapes, whatever it may be) is actively catering to your purpose — and as much of what’s not is removed. Heck, you might not need more than a line-drawing or stick figures.

Some assorted points in my head on this:

1. More generally, just answer the “why” question at every step — why you chose those colors and those sharp edges here, why this character’s head is so big, why is the focus on the red circle — what is it doing to communicate the idea, and is there a clearer way to do it? And if you ever catch yourself rationalizing something with “it just looks cool” — take a step back. Illustration can definitely look cool, but everything cool in it has got to be for a reason.
2. In general, always think “pare down” and “less is more” — chances are you have way more stuff in your picture than is really necessary!
3. On the flip side, a good illustration can be as fully-rendered as a detailed painting — but that would mean that you didn’t just add it because you felt like it. For instance, if that was the only way to get a necessary mood across, or if the illustration specifically relied on referencing Renaissance-era fine art, for example.
4. If you arrived at a decision (style, colors, etc.) "by accident" that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s inappropriate or unjustified. In fact, experimenting is often the only way to determine if something works or not!

5. Think about specific visual metaphors that get your point across most clearly — for example, how do you illustrate a feeling of happiness? A character looking euphoric, light colors, anything cute and personified (alas), a big grin, radiating beams, whatever it may be — and that might be all you need.

   If you’re having a hard time with this, there is a great article by illustrator Jillian Tamaki on this subject that has helped me tremendously. I couldn’t have said what she wrote better.

6. Pay a great deal of attention to hierarchy, or the order of importance. There are several hierarchies to consider — hierarchy of color, value, scale, etc. — they all work together to comprise one overall visual hierarchy. As an illustrator, your job to define exactly what your viewer sees first, where and how their eye is guided around the picture, and what narrative, if any, unfolds from it (this is crucial to getting a message across). Be thinking about how changing the color and size of elements affects this balance and how to use it to your advantage.

   You’ll find a lot of it is common sense — for instance, bigger things are seen first, as are more vibrant colors. A greyscale illustration with one bright red object will draw very particular attention to that object. A picture where the front-and-center is dominated by a figure will place a lot of importance on that figure, no matter its color. Moving that figure off to the side would already shift the balance a great deal. So on and so forth. There’s no rule to figuring out the best composition; again, and again, the general recipe is Try it and See.

7. Be careful where you add details — details are closely related to where the viewer should be getting more visual information out of (which could really affect your hierarchy and, in turn, your illustration’s effectiveness). Inaccurate details could be distracting as well, so using informed visual references where needed is very key (more on this later).
8. Think “more obvious” — you don’t have to beat the viewer over the head with what you’re trying to say, but the more blunt you are, the faster you’ll get the point across. And sometimes that will mean exaggeration and altering reality. For example, it’s much easier to convey the fact that something is shiny or glowing by drawing little cartoon lightbulb rays coming out of it, than it is to render the whole thing in realistic lighting and set that object in a realistic glow. (This is one of those things that could do a lot to dictate what visual style you execute your illustration in.)

Use color with discretion.

…Are you sure your illustration needs color? It might not, for instance, if your line work gets the work done. Don’t forget that a nice clean sketch or a non-colored line work drawing can be a finished illustration!

Illustration © Chi-Wen Lee. Used with permission.

If you add color, it should be because you need it (you very often will).

You might need color, for instance, if your line work alone does not separate shapes as clearly by itself (for instance if all your line-weights are very similar and it’s difficult to see what is where), and if color will help set apart foreground and background, focus attention on something, set a necessary mood, etc.

On the left are two versions of Chi-Wen Lee‘s illustration (you can view her entire process on this project on her blog here). The cut-out by itself does not read as clearly because of the complexity of the lines, all of which have similar weights (thickness). In other words, it’s very hard to see where the dragon is! But, upon adding color, however, the image is much clearer, and there’s a sense of hierarchy and even space that was not there before.

If you must color…

…Then remember you’ll probably need far fewer colors than you think. Look at your favorite illustrations, and I bet you you can identify 3-4 hues tops (if not just 1-2) that it uses for all its parts. And it’s true! You don’t need the whole rainbow.

Get yourself a color wheel and pick a palette of 2-3 compatible colors and stick to them (and perhaps different shades of them, but no more hues). The fewer your choices, the more strict and grounded your decisions will have to be as to which part of the picture needs what color, which means you must make good design decisions in picking them. (And any time you make good design decisions, you score major brownie points!)

Hold up. What does “compatible” mean, and how do I pick these compatible colors?

“Compatible” colors merely means they work together harmoniously. Harmonious doesn’t necessarily mean “tranquil” or “happy” — it just means having some sort of relationship amongst all of them that permeates them.

The goal isn’t to starve you of color choices, or force you to make unrealistic ones. Just like an outfit becomes harder and harder to put together the more colors and patterns you introduce, it becomes harder and harder to make a drawing’s colors look good together the more of them there are. Which is why a limited and considered color palette is very important, lest color become a distraction because of its incongruence.

Any two colors could work together, two colors can be bridged with a third color that would work well with them, and any one color will resolve well with shades of itself.Knowing this, how can we come up with a limited but flexible color palette without using the whole rainbow?

First, let’s look at some ways to select up to 3 hues from our color wheel. (This is the method that I’ve been taught and that I use myself, but I’m sure there’s more than one way to wrap one’s brain around this.)

Now, you can generate other compatible colors that stick within your palette by pulling those colors apart a little bit. To do so, adjust their value (light and dark) and saturation (also known as chroma — how vibrant the color is). You can adjust the hue a bit as well for some nice analogous shades.

Illustration © Tomer Hanuka. Used with permission.

…Though, don’t forget how flexible even one hue can be! (If one is all you need, then one is all you need.) In the illustration below, the blue color is pulled apart to generate many gray-ish, green-ish, purple-ish, brighter, lighter, and darker blues that serve all the needs of the illustration, but still work together as a small family.

Illustration © Tomer Hanuka. Used with permission.

When coloring a drawing, it can be difficult to know where to start, when all you have is your black and white sketch staring at you. What I sometimes do before I even start experimenting with color palettes is just zoom out and block in my entire drawing in black-and-white first (or in one hue), focusing on getting the balance and composition of the relative values right. Once those are there (if you are working digitally), it’s much easier to dive into some color studies.

If you want to keep reading, Douglas Dowd has a great blog post on this topic that really expands on this. (My summary herein hardly does it justice.)

For when you’re in a hurry or just feel like browsing, Adobe has a nifty tool called Kuler that will generate lovely compatible palettes for you.

Use with great discretion.

Go out into the world.

Why can’t I just search online for inspiration? The Internet is much bigger than anywhere I can walk or drive!

I know, right?? My professors are sticklers for requiring us to obtain ideas and inspiration from everywhere but the Internet, which used to perplex me. And I actually didn’t internalize the answer until my professor (and illustrator) John Hendrix laid it out.

And here’s the deal. The Internet indeed makes visual stimulus very easy to find these days. There are thousands of blogs dedicated to aggregating inspirational material from website designs to comics, and Google is available right there for your searching pleasure. But it’s not “searching” for ideas you want to be doing. You want to be happening upon them, be surprised by them, have absolutely no influence on their having found you. Anything with you more in control means they’re coming from your head one way or another.

Discovering brand new ideas online is nigh impossible for exactly this reason, since things you find on the Internet are inherently based on your somehow searching for them. You’re going to need to type some keywords into the search box, or consciously go to a blog that has material of a known type — yes, even StumbleUpon is limiting. Using the Internet, thus, means you need to have some idea in your head to search for — and how can you search for things that you don’t know you’re looking for?

So. Keep your sketchbook (or even your camera phone) with you and just observe, actively. Take photographs, makes doodles, notes, visit corners of the bookstore or the library you always avoid, browse magazines from the 1930s. You’re surrounded by visual inspiration every day, most of which you usually dismiss — but all of it is out there waiting for you, it is not already in your head, and you will not find it unless you open your eyes and let it find you.

Experiment. And then experiment more.

Don’t ever throw away what you’ve done — but take a few minutes to mock up some thumbnails of alternative solutions to whatever it is you’re doing, be it picking a composition, color-choosing, alternative visual metaphors, etc. Don’t be timid, and don’t be afraid to “ruin” it (as long as you keep backups). Good design loves rough play; get as big a range of possibilities as possible! So flip that thing horizontally, mess up all the colors to something completely unexpected, change the point of view, upturn the composition to a different angle, add more objects in, remove them, crop the format to a completely different shape, and go nuts. Even if you think the idea won’t fly. Just try it and see. If you can get a range of 20-50 crazy ideas, you’ll hit on 2-3 really, really, really good ones you would have never come up with otherwise.

Here are some examples of concrete tips to try that have helped me a lot:

• If you’re working digitally, such as in Photoshop, separate your work into layers as much as possible, so you can move things around and reposition them easier. I’ll often have 10-20 layers devoted to just line work (even if it’s all one color and all part of the same “outline”) — just so I can easily nudge and move and rotate several pieces into good compositional places before I decide on anything.
• Backtrack in your process and try to find points at which there were alternative directions you could have taken, instead of the one that led you to where you are now. And try them.
• Possibly the tip I hold closest to my heart: Zoom out and be rough before you zoom in and be painstaking. If you reverse this, the sky will fall on your head! Block in colors roughly first to get the overall balance right, do rough thumbnails of compositions without spending too much love on any one of them, et cetera. If it looks good and balanced zoomed out, you can be confident that when you zoom in to work small it’ll all still sing.
• Be inspired. Go out into the world, take two! (If you are keeping a folder of inspirational material, that would be great to dive into too.) Try looking at illustrations, designs, and other visual material that have nothing to do with what you’re working on — they would offer up the biggest surprises in terms of directions you didn’t consider that might work with your drawing, too.
• Is it an abstract composition? One super-easy trick to reconsider the composition is just to rotate the format. (Or spend some time re-arranging the elements on the page — which should the viewer be drawn to first, and how does rearranging them change the hierarchy?)
• …or perhaps you’re drawing a person, or people. Do they really need to be visible head to toe, or be right in the center? Things tend to get more interesting if you change the scale of the subject relative to the size of the format, experiment with the foregound/middle-ground/background, or play with the edge relationships.

So, why “waste time” on so much experimenting? What if you’ve got a great idea right away and you’re certain you love it?

…it very well may be good, but it may not be the best. And, the only way to evaluate if it’s “the best” or not to compare it to something else — and if you make lots of variations of your idea, the more successful will very clearly shine against the less successful ones.

Especially if one’s illustration experience is still in the works, trusting your brain to always be right the first time isn’t the best idea, which is something I learned the hard way! My last three studio projects were the results of margin sketches I scribbled on loose-leaf paper off-hand, that my professor pointed to and said, “That. Do that. Throw away this… *point to sketch I spent 6 hours on*… and do that.”

This list has a bit more to it, so stick around for Part III as well next week, in which we will wrap up this outline. Hope some of these are helpful so far!

Design Informer

The Process Behind Good Illustration – According to a Young Illustrator

by Natalie Sklobovskaya for DesignInformer

Illustration is not the same thing as art.

“Art” is something philosophers have spent centuries trying to define, sadly with no satisfactory result (a debate that is far beyond the scope of this article). But illustration, while it covers a broad range of image-making, does have very distinct meanings, and it is very different from just artwork.

This is not a tutorial. It’s not about how to make a glossy Twitter icon, how to replicate that anime pic step by step, or how to make 30 awesome heavy-metal texture effects in Photoshop (linked is an article that inspired me very much). While studying illustration in college and exploring it on my own, the biggest lesson that I’ve learned so far hasn’t been how to vector the best darn shiny things you’ve ever seen. What I learned was that to be good at illustration means to first understand exactly how it differs from just putting down nice-looking doodles on paper, and that the rest just flows from there.

In this two-part article, I’d like to share some tenets behind what I think good illustration is, and what I learned about the process and technique behind how to execute it. Hopefully some fellow aspiring illustrators out there will find some of these helpful — or maybe even identify with some as part of their own process, too!

If any of my professors are reading this: I hope I didn’t disappoint you, please don’t fail me in your classes.

Part 1: What is illustration?

A picture is worth a thousand words.

You see art around you all the time. No doubt your attention was once seized by an interesting editorial graphic, which offered an intriguing metaphor to a drab politics-related story you’d never dive into otherwise. You’ve certainly encountered visually compelling band posters, and storybook pictures that are much more rewarding to peruse than the text itself. But yet, comparatively, the idea of looking at an equally visually lush oil still life makes some part of your brain yawn. Why is that?

The type of art we call illustration has a two-fold purpose. The first and foremost is that it speaks to you. It tells you a story, visually represents an idea, conveys a message, delivers information, offers a visual accompaniment to text, etc. — it does something. Second, but certainly not least, it presents that “something” in an interesting and engaging fashion.

…So, that’s pretty vague, right? Hmm. Well, let’s first try to place “illustration” in context of the general term of “art” and see if we can’t pull out some of its defining characteristics. After all, something makes that oil still life so much less engaging for our brain.

1. Illustration is taking art, and putting it to work.

What we think of as “fine art” tends be focused on the aesthetics of its craft and its visual — tangible paintbrush strokes, interplay of colors and values, the juxtaposition of different media, the expression of technique, for instance; the most primitive visual elements of execution that in and of themselves are meant to be appreciated, beautiful, or evocative.

Often, it’s meant to go beyond just being visually provoking, which is where it approaches the illustrative realm. For instance, Monet’s haystacks were meant to be a visual documentary of light-rays upon hay at different seasons and times of the day; but until that is brought to the forefront, fine art is marked by the fact that the subject tends to be less important than how it looks.

And Kenneth Noland’s circles look pretty neat, but, as the painting sits there now, it doesn’t illustrate anything except… well, itself. Nor does it do anything aside from expressing its aesthetic. Illustration, by definition, must always have representation intent that goes beyond merely its looks. It must not express, it must communicate, and it cannot be evoking form alone. That is, “looking pretty” cannot be its only function.

Sometimes you’ll really need context to help, and that’s okay. For instance, what if those circles were to accompany the article on the left? You wouldn’t be able to resist reading psychological meaning into those rings of color, without which the art was silent. In this simple example, we’ve taken the art and put it to work.

So, is that it, it’s an illustration now? Definitely. Is it the best we can do? Perhaps not, since the painting wasn’t optimized for this particular interpretation when it was being painted, which suggests we can do better.

On the right is the graphic that accompanied the article. Which one you’d prefer is subject to taste, since arguably both visually address the article in compelling ways. But it’s clear that the brain illustration on the left is loaded with much more communicative symbolism because it can tell its story even when it stands alone. It’s an image that must be designed, and nothing that can be arrived at just by sticking your brush onto the paper and letting your love of colors take over.

2. Illustration is clear, empirical, and intentional.

It would seem that perfection is attained not when no more can be added, but when no more can be removed.

Antoine de Saint Exupéry

To reiterate: as an illustrator, your job is not to demonstrate your painting techniques, color mixing, or your mastery of the male nude — only to find the most efficient, clear, and direct way to make the viewer feel and know what you want them to feel and know. Do nothing extra, because extra stuff (be it extra details, people, trees, colors, lines, etc.) in your illustration could only hamper this process. Just like writing an overly wordy essay or an instruction manual with too many details makes information difficult to digest.

Keep in mind also that “clear” is not the same thing as “simple.” A complicated drawing can communicate an idea very clearly, and a simple drawing can be hard to understand. But the best illustrations, be they simple or detailed, are clear — that is, they have the fewest unnecessary things in them. And what they do have in them is there for a reason, and it all has the function of manipulating your focus, attention, and emotional response to what the illustrator intends you to get out of it. They have been stripped down to the most empirical essential colors, shapes, lines, etc. needed to get their point across in the most efficient manner.

3. An illustration’s visual style, colors, etc. are not random either.

I find that a lot of young artists (including myself only mere months ago) tend to think of style-selection backwards. They look at some awesome illustrations, and think about what about it makes it look so awesome, dead-set on replicating the awesomeness in their own works. And it’s great that they’re out looking at stuff. The worst thing you can do is sit inside your own head and “scrape your brain” for ideas, as Jillian Tamaki put it.

Unfortunately, what they usually arrive at is something like this:

“Okay, I’m going to do my entire piece with acrylics in these reds and oranges like that second one, do my highlights just like that first one in Photoshop, and, oh yeah, maybe do something in a paper-cut-out style to have a bold shape in the background like that third one, and it’ll look as cool as those do.”

A noble pursuit, to boot! But the problem with such reasoning is that looking "cool" should only be a byproduct of its being functional. Else we’re just making art.

The way I think is best to go about it is exactly the opposite — first thinking what you want your illustration to do, then what techniques could make that happen best, and then how to make those techniques visually compelling. Finding the most effective medium/colors/ style/etc. usually will take some experimenting, but the most important thing is to go for "brains over looks" and not the other way around (much more on this later).

You might find you don’t even need to be a staggeringly skilled painter to pull it off. For example, which image on the left communicates "shiny candle" in the fastest and clearest way?

4. ____________?

There are plenty of other ways to define illustration that many hold close to their hearts. For instance, some of my peers have defined it as:

• art that is purposely made to be displayed to or be meaningful to someone else
• art that stands in for a concept
• designed artwork
• art with communication value

Somewhere in there is a good definition; yours may be different still, but they all hover roughly around the same idea. Illustration is making images that have more purpose than merely expressing their aesthetic and expressing you — they have value beyond mere visual expression, whether it’s offering a visual component to text, telling a story, representing a concept, et cetera.

In fact, if you’ve ever thought that you can never venture into the image-making realm because InDesign and beautiful typography is where you hang out, think again! The better designers — rather than the better artists — tend to make the better illustrators.

In Part II of this article we’ll look at how all this rote textbook knowledge can translate to specific process and technique in your work, no matter your skill level, preferred medium, or strengths. Stay tuned!