In the midst of pressure for designers to keep technical skills and software repertoire fresh, it is just as important to keep feeding your creativity, and challenging the part of your brain that makes your work unique. However, it can be hard to create projects for yourself and produce them in a vacuum. That’s where a site like Illustration Friday fits in perfectly.
Illustration Friday is the brainchild of illustrator Penelope Dullaghan, and presents a weekly topic chosen from a list suggested by site participants. Themes such as “crash,” “sprout,” “clean,” and “safe” challenge you to come up with a way to illustrate the concept. Every week, an image is randomly selected as the “pick of the week,” showcasing that weeks’ concept.
The expressed mission of the site is to create a “weekly creative outlet/participatory art exhibit for illustrators and artists of all skill levels,” with “no clients looking for a particular thing, no one judging the outcome of the work.” It’s a great place to get ideas for different illustration styles and media, since you can browse the works by medium or by style (images are grouped in both categories).
Browsing through different illustrators’ takes on the same concept reinforces the importance of pushing your ideas beyond the obvious or the clichéd. The memorable illustrations are the ones that produce a lovely little “aha!” reaction in the viewer. The phrase “thinking outside the box” is so hackneyed that it underscores this point by almost undermining it, but every time you see an illustration with a particularly original answer to the topic, you are reminded of the joy an image can create when it conveys a message in an unexpected way.
Apart from the opportunity to share your work and be inspired by others, the site features interviews by some of the industry’s brightest illustrators. You’ll learn about their creative process, the way they manage their lives as illustrators, and the ways they work with clients and generate ideas. You can also benefit from IF’s forum, where artists ask questions and share information, and the site’s list of recommended resources such as books, printing services, and other useful sites.
To participate in Illustration Friday, all you need is an illustration of the current week’s topic, a site to upload it to (either your own site or an account on Flickr or similar), and a 50×50 pixel thumbnail of your illustration. You can only submit one illustration per topic, but you are welcome to submit something you’ve already done if it suits the topic. New topics are posted every Friday. This week’s topic is “poem.” So, how are you going to illustrate it?
