I was at Barnes and Nobles the other day perusing the magazine isle when I ran across the Communication Arts Illustration Annual. At first I was very excited. I know I should be keeping up on this sort of thing, you know, aware of when this issue is due on shelves, but I am not...oh well. Anyway, my excitement soon died upon fingering through the multitudes of pages. Illustration today is BORING. I am not an expert by ANY means what-so-ever, but I do like to think of myself as one who recognizes exciting imagery, or at least entertaining visuals. All the illustration in this magazine was either shit that has been done bunches of times before, or illustrations by illustrators trying to copy all that shit that has been done bunches of times before. Straight up figure paintings. Vectors. Drawings with digital color. Digital line drawings. Realism and swirls. Surely good concepts but without any eye catching charisma. I caught no feeling behind any of it. I remember in school being taught that style does not make good illustrations, and I do believe that to be true, but maybe style is just what some of these excellent conceptual minds need. I've felt this way about these illustration annuals and books for a while now. Just the same old shit in different bindings. Now I am also not saying that these illustrators are bad at what they do, in fact I will say that they are very talented. What I am saying is that it is repetitive and seemingly visually uninspired. Basically uninteresting to look at.
What I did find at the bookstore was the new How magazine with a "special focus" on handmade design. The articles focus around the implication of handmade imagery or objects within design. For a lil while now I have considered the work I am currently creating to draw from the idea of handmade design, but from a bit more literal standpoint than what the new issue of How focuses on. I use rulers, stencils, square edges, large areas of flat color, striping, type, even some simplistic mathmatics, etc...to create much of my work. I even use "stock" photography, but for me "stock" means the stockpile of ancient magazines and cataloges from which I draw my photographic imagery from (not a website to which I pay a monthly fee to jack their digital photos.) You could say that I take design aesthetics and implicate them into my handmade work. Whereas handmade design implicates hand done techniques into it's design. Basically a 180 but in fact so similar that it's almost the same.....and fuck...I talked myself in circles and forgot where I was going with all this, but either way, pick up the new issue of How. It's pretty dope and I found it to be very relavant to myself and my work.
In the end I just don't know. Maybe I don't like illustration in general, hell maybe I dont like "art" in general, maybe it's not my bag, but illustration is what I supposedly went to school for and lately I have been questioning that decision, though I do find solace in the fact that the lines between all these disciplines has been blurring for a while now. Either way...my work most likely still sucks in the grand scheme of things so fuck it.
Over the past few days Mutual Design Playground has gone through an overhaul. There is now a rating system, a "voted best" catagory, and a bunch of other junk I haven't had a chance to mess around with yet.
