Inevitably, an illustrator will be asked at some point in their career to design something, a business card, a website, a promotional flier. Sounds easy enough to the untrained mind. But are illustration and design so easily entwined? Do the two disciplines crossover as easily as one might expect or is there more separation? This week, we ask three webcomic artists to explain the differences and similarities between illustration and design.

Chris Impink

Designer by day, comic artist by night, Chris Impink of Fragile Gravity regularly finds himself working between both disciplines.

Illustration and design are of course both aspects of applied arts, and I think that in the ideal workflow they feed off of each other equally. Unfortunately, I wouldn’t know because in practice, the nature of the job dictates that will be strictly subservient to the other.

For much of my professional life, which has been in the government contracting world, technical requirements and especially the volume of copy place such a burden on layout, that working to accommodate them severely narrows my design choices; the illustration is therefore further confined to what the necessarily stringent design system will allow, and nearly becomes a sad afterthought.

Aside from being wordy (if you can call their jargon and acronyms words), the government world is dreadfully literal. A lot of my time on the job is spent in Photoshop making composites that mediate a too many competing ideas and agendas, all of which must then fit a tight space in the design grid that I’ve already filled out in InDesign. It’s about as far removed from the magazine world as you can get – where the illustration can dictate to the layout, color schema and font choices. I’ve wondered how I’d take to a career shift in that direction – would the first assignment with its newfound freedom feel liberating or daunting compared to my current experience, or would I run around the all opportunities like a yapping terrier not knowing which car to chase first?

And my avocations don’t give as much leniency to illustration in the balancing act against design as one might think. Fragile Gravity works in a fairly limited screen real estate that I established when we started the comic in 2002. The strip is always 680 pixels wide because that was a reasonable width for browsers at the time; if I were starting again today, the images would be larger. Resolution limits the font size, so the copy eats a fair amount of the page. Combine that with my own workflow – which is to draw the components of a strip rather than a completed layout like most cartoonists would – and the habits of my professional life become firmly entrenched in my comic: the artwork is assembled around the script in Photoshop. It’s nowhere as limiting as what I do for my day job, but it’s the same pattern. My goal for my next comic project to is break out of the pattern and work more like a “real” comicker.

So, while illustration is my first love (how many 10-year old think about design careers instead of cartoons anyway?) I’d have to grudgingly concede to being a stronger designer than an illustrator, or at least an illustrator in the classical medium. Even then, I’m not one of those guys who can espouse how their design follows this established theory or that design school. My approach has always been more intuitive, probably to the chagrin of my art directors, and I’m usually at a loss for words when asked to explain my choices in a comp review.

I would say I’m a stronger illustrator than a designer in the new media sense of the word, i.e. the aforementioned compositing work, and an even stronger imaging technology geek than any of these. The part of my brain that originally went to school for engineering (I had figured it’d make for more reliable employment in the long run – it didn’t take) is compulsively poring over the news feeds for new graphics programs or techniques. I can script or program pretty well for a guy with an art degree, and a lot of my spare time is spent learning fairly obscure power tools like Shake. I really do live and breathe all this stuff. Between the day job, the comic, various other projects which come and go, it’s sad how little of my day is not spent with graphics in some way.

The other part of my personal struggle between design and illustration is that while I enjoy these things, I also bore easily, and so I’m not the kind of guy who will perfect any one thing to a world-class level; I just can’t focus that way for enough time because something shiny comes along.

Ooo! Lookit that!

Garth Graham

As a trained industrial designer, Garth Graham of GCG Studios returns to give his insight as a designer and comic illustrator.

Illustration and Design are intrinsically tied together, but are very different actions. You can’t illustrate without designing. By illustrating, crafting, sculpting, building, you naturally make choices about how the finished product will look, and thus you have “designed.” However, it’s not until you start consciously making those decisions, recognizing how those decisions impact other choices, and knowing why you make the choices you do that you can say you are “designing.”

Ian McConville did a beautiful job illustrating the difference between design and illustration back when he did Mac Hall:

http://machall.com/view.php?date=2003-04-05

Going through Virginia Tech’s College of Architecture and Design, my professors wouldn’t accept the answer because it looks cool either. In retrospect, I think they said that not because it looks cool is a bad reason for doing things, but rather because that’s almost never the only reason you make a design choice. You put runes next to your character because your character is Norse, or a magic user, or part of an ancient cult of a dark being of unspeakable power. And you do it because it looks cool. It is that subconscious reason for drawing things one way as opposed to another that is the hallmark of design.

When designing a product I almost never go with the first thing I draw. I’ll do multiple iterations of what I’m making, always asking myself why does it look this way? What is its purpose, its function? I’ll take my sketches and refine them and refine them again until I get a finished design I am happy with. However, I usually reserve this process for only main characters in comics, mostly because it is time intensive. Background characters get one draw, simply because they’re just background, unimportant. I don’t have time for them. But major characters, places, and items will get sketched out time and time again until I get them right. Some characters get figured out much faster than others, usually because they’re very iconic, and that’s fine. You don’t need to spend agonizing hours designing and re-designing characters. But slapping down the first thing that comes to you and calling it done, isn’t really designing, it’s just drawing.
In much of my design career the reasons for making choices were based on how it benefits the user or how it furthers the purpose of this product. In illustrating comics, I’ve found the parameters for design to be looser. I don’t have to have hours of research backing up why a character has pointy ears, or why they have green eyes and red hair or why the background of this page looks like old manuscript. I have my reasons, of course, but it doesn’t take nearly as much to justify them. If you were to ask me why Cailyn from Finder’s Keepers is a redhead, I’d tell you it’s because she’s of Irish descent. That’s enough justification for that aspect of the character’s design. Yet, I could have just as easily justified it with I like redheads and no one would think twice about it. That reason would never fly in the design world, of course. I’d have to have extensive user-testing to figure out the preferred color, and preferred shade of red, if red even was the preferred color. Illustration is more fun that way. You can make things look they way you want them to, simply because you like them that way. Of course, things like hair color are fairly trivial character design features. Things like body type, uniforms, iconic equipment, and the like usually have deeper reasons behind them. So, just because you don’t have to have a lot of reason behind the design choices you make, doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have reasons. It’s those reasons that make the difference between a well designed character/page/image/logo and one that just looks cool.

I find that while you can be as equally good at design as illustration, most people are better at one or the other. Most frequently I find illustrators who are good at designing within the confines of their illustration work. Their character designs are beautiful, but ask them to design a logo or layout a book and you get mediocrity at best. Consider how many artists do you’ve seen who do beautiful artwork but also have terrible websites? Usually the site in question looks great but is frustrating to navigate, or is so chock full of distracting (if cool) flash transitions that it’s just obnoxious. It’s because they can make things look great, but they don’t take the time to design things out. They don’t know why they make the choices they do, or they leave it at it looks cool, rather than considering any more meaningful reasons. Conversely, a lot of the people I went through school with who studied architecture or design weren’t terribly gifted artists though turned out to be fine designers.

In the end I suppose it’s deceptively simple. Design is making choices. Illustration is drawing those choices. You have to do one to do the other, but it takes some effort and re-working the way you think to do both well.

Ross Nover

You might not be able to tell from his comic, The System, but Ross Nover actually draws things once in while.

Illustration and design are two very related fields, but have their definite subtlety and character. In the world I live in (mostly the graphic design world), illustrators and the things they produce are considered a separate job, a skill that some people have specially but something that you almost need to point out to those you’re working with, to remind them you can do that sort of work. Again, they are related fields, so both involve a fair amount of thinking through the client’s needs, goals, and trying to produce quality visual work. However, illustration is generally allowed to have more of a creator’s visual style as part of the piece, whereas design tends to focus more on trying to lose your own style in favor of the client’s needs.

That being said, I think you can be good at both. The line certainly gets blurry sometimes. It isn’t as though a graphic designer isn’t allowed to pick up a brush / pen / brushpen / wacom tablet to put together some quick doodles to go along with a project. And at the same time illustrators are often asked to add some “design elements” to their illustrations. Still, both of these are considered separate job descriptions and if you are doing both, you should be getting paid for both. You don’t need to be a stickler about it, but if you find yourself doing large parts of illustration for a design piece, keep in mind that you have on your illustrator hat as well when it comes to your contract and getting paid for the work that you’ve done.

Just be careful not to paint yourself as a “jack of all trades”. Sometimes you accidently show people that you’re a master of none.

For more on this stuff, check out the AIGA’s website which has tons of resources. http://www.aiga.org/

I’d like to thank our artists for answering this week’s question so thoroughly. So illustrators, designers, art monkeys, care to weigh in with your thoughts?