Should You Know How to Illustrate as a Designer?
Illustration v. Photography
Design and illustration have always been intertwined in advertising. But more and more we’re seeing it used to define brand identity as well. Illustration gives more personality to an ad or brand than perhaps photography can allow. Photography certainly sets a mood: dark and mysterious, fantastical and dreamy, lively and flawless. But illustration can bring a level of authenticity. It feels personal, handmade, maybe even a little fun or quirky.
Should I have illustration skills to be a successful designer?
These days there are stock sites galore. Getty/iStock and Shutterstock have been traditionally used to find great photos, backgrounds and vector icons. But with the rise of illustration in design, newer and more illustration-specific sites have gained popularity, like Openpeeps and Humaaans.
As a brand and marketing graphic designer, project deadlines are often too tight to warrant creating custom illustrations for each new project. You definitely don’t need to be an illustrator to be a successful designer. However there’s a growing need and niche for illustrators who can make a brand unique with a consistent illustrative style that spans a company’s website, products and ad campaigns.
If I am pursuing illustration, which program should I use?
If you find yourself enjoying sketching more than designing layouts or find you’re using illustration in every design piece you create, you may be a good candidate for pursing a niche in illustration. But what program should you be using?
Procreate has become one of the most popular tools for contemporary illustrators. As an iPad app, it’s the most portable digital illustration program. Used in conjunction with an Apple Pencil, it is as intuitive as drawing on a piece of paper. Procreate is a great option for spot illustrations you’d use for most digital design projects.
However, if you’re serious about pursuing illustration and plan on making larger scale, more complex pieces, you will find that the larger the canvas, the fewer layers are available. Layer organization gives you greater control and editing abilities if your work includes different levels of depth or if you’re a big fan of clipping masks.
Lastly, I would not recommend using Procreate to design for print pieces. Procreate defaults to the RGB color space and designing in CMYK on the app significantly changes the color profile appearance. If you design a print piece in RGB and then try to later convert it to CMYK, you’ll find the work to be washed out or less vibrant than your original design.
Photoshop offers the greatest flexibility and versatility for serious illustrators. Photoshop allows you to work with a very large canvas and an unlimited number of layers. It’s easy to add effects, experiment with different colors and add texture and depth.
However pursuing Photoshop illustration has some upfront costs. You will need an Adobe subscription and a tablet, such as a Wacom, to have a more natural “hand touched” result that you can’t truly achieve with a trackpad or a mouse. Unless you’re willing to get a higher end tablet, such as a Cintiq, many tablets don’t have the screen display directly on them and there is a learning curve to draw on one surface and see your marks appear on your monitor.
Although you may be able to pick up Procreate and make a drawing without tutorials, I would greatly recommend watching tutorials for Photoshop. There are so many tools and they’re not always intuitive. But once you know the ropes, the possibilities are endless!
If you are an icon designer, enjoy clean and precise shapes, don’t work as much with linework or lean towards geometric creations, Illustrator is the app for you. While Procreate and Photoshop are limited by what canvas size you start with (which will affect the final image resolution), Illustrator uses vectors, forgoing pixels, and removing any potential resolution loss. So you could design something that’s two inches wide and blow it up to 2 feet wide and the image quality would not be diminished.
Illustrator is also a great software to use if your work is ultimately going to be animated. Illustrator can create SVG graphics that are seamlessly integrated into websites and other digital platforms. Illustrator won’t get you a particularly hand drawn feel, but the final product will look polished and professional.
So am I on the right path?
Experimenting is how we grow and learn. Play around in the programs you have available. Explore different stock sites and design trends, websites and advertisements that catch your eye. Make inspiration boards of the work you’re attracted to and it will give you a better idea of the work you may want to explore creating yourself.
Illustration is a way to give your design personality. It can be used in conjunction with photography to add layers and dimension. Consider playing with handmade or stock illustration in your next design, it might open the door to a new niche or aesthetic preference.
