
Amongst the inhabitants of the 21st century, dwells an unlucky tribe of people that supposedly lead the van guard of our modern civilization. I call them unlucky because, even though they lead the charge towards modernity, they perhaps have the least physical resources to do so, not just that, they also come across as arrogant, entitled and hotheaded to the other tribes. One of the most difficult of tasks that this tribe faces is the ability to verbally communicate to others what is that they do for food, or to put it simply explaining how can these scribbles that look as if they were drawn by a 5 year old constitute as a hard day’s labor or how can writing lines of gibberish numbers going to help you move out of your parent’s house. Yes, I am talking about us Millennials. Millions of years from now, when Aliens dig up our fossilized remains, confused as to why phones appear all over the fossil record with the word NOKIA on them, they’ll try to decipher our complex history, and within it, perhaps the most complicated is the relationship between the Millennials and all the other generations that existed alongside it. In this blog, I’ll attempt to tackle the tip of the tip of the iceberg by dissecting one of the many jobs that earned Millennials their notorious reputation for being incomprehensible. If you’re having trouble communicating your illustration career to a relative, a friend, a significant other, then this blog isn’t for you and you might as well just tell them you’re an accountant. As an illustrator, I have a hard time explaining to people what I do for a living. Not because of any complexity in the matter, it’s quite the opposite. It’s actually very simple, and here the problem lurks. It comes off as too simple, usually followed by the obvious remark “Oh you’re an artist”. I usually have a ready-made answer for this debacle of a remark, but I tend to not use it out of both longevity and my personal mental state, so I just nod and agree; even though if any artist out there who’d see my drawings would give me money to go learn basic anatomy. In this blog I’ll try to briefly explain what I actually do for a living and what I also want to do as well.
If I could narrow down my work into a statement it would be “Helping people and businesses better communicate their narrative to their audience members”. Recently it has become very difficult for a company or a startup to compete seriously without utilizing digital mediums. Businesses are currently fighting for exposure, a limited resource that is measured by the time an audience member spends online, meaning you have to fight your way to that individual’s timetable during his/her stay online. For that I believe that brands need an illustrative edge to be able to compete for that time. As an illustrator I jump on board to add this illustrative edge. One example of this is both Slack and drop box. Both utilized brilliant brand illustrations for a more unique digital standing. Brand illustration is one thing on a long list of services that illustrators provide. Looking at your surroundings now you can easily identify how illustrators contributed to it. Your “I love coffee” mug with a coffee addict on it is a product of an illustrator. Your book shelf is riddled with work done by illustrators from book cover illustrations, to infographics to the illustrations inside the book. If you have wallpaper in your bedroom or house, the patterns on it were created by an illustrator. Illustrators are basically creative that bring life to both physical and virtual space. We create worlds for mediums of all types. Worlds that people enjoy on daily basis but don’t go the extra mile to realize who created them. I recently had the pleasure to work on heaps of projects of myriad types ranging from editorial illustrations to wall prints. This gives me the chance to learn techniques and tricks on daily basis to enhance and optimize my process. One things that I’ve been learning for the past months is incorporating animation and motion graphics into my work, which takes a lot of effort and time to learn. This ability to continuously learn comes with the title and I’m very proud to call myself an illustrator. I hope this blog was informative, I had lots of fun writing it. I unfortunately didn’t manage to finish up “Ritual” because It got too detailed and I got swamped with commissions so I’ll be setting another date for its release which will give me a lot of time to refine and work on it. See you next week!
#creativeindustry #life #blogging #illustration #illustrators #weeklyblog