DD2000: Design Product - Editorial

Editorial illustration is one of the first commissions an illustrator will take on. More often than not, particular illustrators will be commissioned to do a piece for a magazine, newspaper, etc, because they carry a certain style that would best suit the content of the article.

The key to creating a successful editorial accompaniment is to utilize the main visual components of the article, but do so in such a way that it fits the house style of the publication.

I'm going to be taking a look at 4 different editorial pieces by 4 different illustrators, and compare their visual positives, and how effective they are in their chosen publications.

The first one I'm going to be looking at is this one, by Chinese illustrator Shan Jiang, for Wired Magazine (US and UK).

Based in Shanghai and the UK, Shan Jiang currently works for I Love Dust UK design agency, and carries a very distinctive look throughout his work, which seems to mainly consist of detailed ink-drawn vignettes and elements later worked up digitally. Jiang seems to be rather fond of using texture overlays in his work, something I personally have started to do, although admittedly not as subtle as Jiang's.

The above piece, for Wired Magazine, was commissioned for the “Cheat with Science” section of the magazine. This one, in particular, named “Navigate the Great Indoors”, gives advice to those reliant on GPS on how to find their way through large buildings. I am not even joking. There is a whole article dedicated to this.

You can see how Jiang has used the familiar location icon used in services like Google Maps, etc. Jiang has also done well to keep the colour range to a minimum, with warm orange tones in contrast to the blue sky. The blooming effect, especially on the buildings, breaks up what would have been a very technical, cumbersome illustration. The remaining detail on the buildings is wonderful, very uniform. It is also worth taking note of the decline in definition of said buildings, the further back the image reaches.

Now this illustration communicates the message of the article rather well, if not in a very surreal way. Whilst here, Jiang uses a decent amount of strong lines and overall, seems quite illustrative, Christian Montenegro's work retains a more digital outcome, with images comprised of simple shapes, such as this one.

Montenegro, an Argentinean illustrator and designer, produced this piece for New Scientist, for a feature about the nature of neutrinos; “Keys to the Universe”. Right from the first glance, you can see that Montenegro's work is a lot more graphic design based, and uses geometric shapes to piece together his images. Something Montenegro shares with Jiang, is the use of textures, although whilst Jiang appears to digitally overlay his work, Montenegro's method looks more traditional, and more like a rough screen printing technique has been employed to get this effect. In various areas, you can even see what appears to look like brush strokes. Possible stencil use? Or is it yet another texture overlay in Photoshop? In any case, it looks a lot more convincing than Jiang's, which I can only assume is there to break up large areas of similar colour, to make it look less harsh.

The colour scheme in this, along with a vast majority of Montenegro's work, is very limited, unless a variation is required. You can see here, two examples of the same commission, the left hand side one being the front cover of that particular issue, and the right being an accompaniment to the article inside, which shows uniform lines of geometric key shapes. The one on the right, due to the size of the elements being reduced vastly, makes it a lot less evident that only red, blue and yellow were used. This can be compared to Jiang's work again, in the way that in that particular piece, Jiang only really used two main colours; orange and blue, but is different in the way that Jiang blended the two together more traditionally, whereas Montenegro overlaid colours to achieve greens, oranges, etc.

Staying with graphic design slightly, I would like to take a look at Nishant Choksi, a UK-based illustrator and designer, who has a distinctive, kitsch, almost 1940s-50s Americana feel to it.

Here is a piece Choksi made for The New Yorker, for their article, “Magic Mountain”, on the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Choksi's work can differ from a cleaner, tidier feel similar to Montenegro's work, or it can be comprised of very loose line work, like this piece above. Again, the colour range is very limited, which was a wise choice; I imagine too much colour would have overpowered this piece, which in essence, doesn't even need colour to be effective, as it gets across the message perfectly.

The illustration itself is very basic; simplified characters, a staple of Choksi's work, and jagged, angular mountains, with crudely added shading with what appears to be the work of a brush. So what we have here is an interesting effect in which the unkempt outline of these shapes goes so far as to look intentional from a certain standpoint, as if Choksi wanted it to look EXACTLY like this. Looking at the piece, I can see why cleaning up the edges of the shaded sections, and anywhere else on the piece for that matter, would have been a folly on Choksi's behalf, as it would have not had as much character, not as much animation as the main congregation.

If I'm to compare Choksi's work to that of Jiang and Montnegro, I'd say Choksi could be seen as the mid-way point between the two, one being very illustrative, and the other being very design-based; Choksi's work lies somewhere in between, the best of both worlds, in a sense.

For a publication like the New Yorker, I feel Choksi's work retains the subtlety and simplicity most other editorial pieces in the paper would. The best comparison I could make is the Guardian newspaper in the UK, in which the editorial pieces rarely go all out, like this next one.

Marcos Chin, an illustrator based in New York, takes a lot of influence from Asian art, one such example of this is this piece that was commissioned by Car and Driver magazine (US), named “The Lightening Lap”. You can see Chin has used various elements from what seems to be Japanese mythology (although it does seem there are some Chinese influences in here too...). Unlike the others, this is bursting with colour; a vibrant display of pinks, oranges, greens, blues, etc. The line work varies in tone too, from black, to dark maroons, to pink, even white. This is something I personally should be paying attention to, as I usually don't take the hue of line into account.

The elements are the product of the dust being kicked up by the screeching wheel of the sports car, a supposed visual metaphor of something wild, something free. This is a very animated piece, filled with lots of different kinds of illustration; whether highly detailed and coloured mythological creatures, or just line-art of simple dust clouds. In all of this, the visible back end of the car is almost lost entirely, save for a bold black wheel.

In comparison to the three other pieces, this is probably the most different, because it tries ideas the others didn't, like a wide colour range and purposely chaotic composition. Speaking of composition, I would go as far as to say this piece sort of complies with the old ukiyo-e wood block prints, which span from the 17^th to 20^th centuries. One of ukiyo-e's main characteristics was composition; at the time, the western world of artists would have never attempted to use up as much space as the ukiyo-e artists did, and despite not being put into practice here, carrying an illustration out of the frame and then back again was unheard of in the western world.

I imagine this editorial would have suited the article very well, going by the title and all. As long as the magazine isn't something fairly plain and frugal like most motoring magazines over this side of the Atlantic, I don't think it would look out of place at all.

So there we have it. Four different editorial illustrations, which share similarities, but are also quite different, yet equally effective for their causes. It just goes to show editorial illustration is just as diverse as any other field in art and design, and after all, these publications sought after these particular artists from the off.