image is everything

Just like with the hundreds of thousands of typefaces or ways of making words, there are dozens and dozens of ways of making pictures. You can use icons, you can use drawings, you can use photography, and photography these days can be manipulated to achieve all kinds of different end results. You can reference the world of art, you can use historical archive material, you can generate your own images. So there is no single way of making images, or using images.

illustration

Illustration has become a very popular element in much consumer branding–related graphic design over the past few years. This is partly a result of corporations’ desires to play down connotations of impersonal and mercenary globalisation: illustration is a very ‘human’ and personal form of visual communication.

It’s also partly a result of the fact that designer-illustrators are embracing typography in their work. This creates a new seductive messaging that combines the directness of typography with the sensory appeal of illustration, pattern and form-making.