sixteen
putting illustration in context
Innovations in Visual Metaphor
I’m an illustrator from the golden age of editorial illustration, a period that ostensibly ended with the coming of the internet. A big thing at that time was conceptual illustration. It’s hard to imagine now the innumerably vast number of light bulbs, piggy banks, dollar signs, and other visual clutter that was used during that hedonistic period of visual metaphor. And I was a serial offender. To this day I cannot fully wash clean my conscience from the permanent acrylic ink stained guilt.
When I think back to this time of convoluted, obtuse, and obfuscated communication it’s hard to wrap my head around why we did it. What were we thinking … or overthinking? Was it simply an attempt to look smart, or a global conspiracy to build an elite intelligentsia? Was it a mass delusion, a group psychosis, or were we just really bored? Why didn’t we just draw what we mean?
Now I know better. Gone are the mind numbing days of getting lost in a rabbit hole of twisted and cliched thinking. But that doesn’t mean I’ve stopped using visual metaphor. Once I was able to remove myself from the cult of conceptual overthinking, using visual metaphor became a lot clearer and easier. How? By putting it into context … literally. I figured out that if you put any illustration into a specified context it acts as a visual metaphor.
Here is an example. Say I am commissioned to illustrate an article that talks about the future of something. Technology, society, whatever. In the old days I would be desperately scouring our collective consciousness for something that symbolizes the future. But now, I just draw the future. Whatever I want it to be, whatever I want to draw really. A person in space, a space port, space gate, spaceship, or space whatever. Then all I have to do is take my drawing of a spaceship travelling through a space port and combine it with some text that talks about innovation (or the future of whatever) and the juxtaposition of the text and image creates a visual metaphor through simple association. This works in any context, want to communicate teamwork? Draw your favorite team sport and put it in context. How about growth, any drawing with flora or gardening put in context would communicate the idea just fine!