Paperzine - News

You know what it’s like. Eager, or tentative, or shy, or brashly confident illustration graduates drop their portfolio off at your studio and you honestly mean to go through their work in detail, and then something comes in, then someone comes in, then you go out, then the lights go out, and somehow all you can do is grab three minutes to look at their work on the day the illustrator comes back to collect it. If the scenario sounds familiar, For Love & Money: New Illustration, an authorative and comprehensive global collection of new styles and directions in illustration compiled by design and art writer Liz Farelly, practitioner Olivia Triggs and creative director Micheal Dorrian, will be a godsend to busy designers, art editors, art directors and commissioning creatives everywhere.

There are more surfaces and delivery media for imagery than ever before – mobile phones, websites and blogs, independent print and virtual magazines, ad campaigns, labels, movies, online animation, retail environments and homeware are just some that immediately spring to mind – meaning it can be hard to locate and identify work that stands out from the crowd and stay in touch with directions in the form. Particularly when, as the authors point out in For Love & Money, we now live in an image-making world in which anything goes, an assertion borne out by the collection of work in the book; here are more than 400 colour illustrations by more than 80 contemporary practitioners offering a terrific showcase of new talent and amply illustrating how wide-ranging and eclectic their work is. It’s all here, from a resurgence in crafts-based approaches and production that include skills and materials like painting, needlework, printmaking and collage to a wide array of computer-based work and everything in between – including graffiti and street art and inventive mash-ups of traditional and digital skills. Such variety makes the book a delight to browse (particularly if a good knowledge of art history means you enjoy playing ‘guess the influences’) and the mini interviews accompanying the plethora of images offer just the right balance of information and creative insight – definitely one to enhance and inform designer’s lives everywhere.

www.laurenceking.com