Art director–turned–illustrator Penelope Dullaghan, whose name I previously knew only from Illustration Friday, has a series of five posts up at Sessions.edu’s Notes on Design blog about The Unfolding of an Illustration Project.
So the way it starts is usually with your assignment. And you get this little sensation in the back of your brain that makes you think: “Boy, an illustration would be perfect for this!” (I agree, it would!) And so you set out to look for the perfect illustrator for the job.
. . .
Then you tell us about the project: timeline, your ideas, the client’s ideas, (or that you have NO ideas… we can help there, too), the budget, etc. And we’ll be pleasant on the phone and say yes, we’d love to work with you. (See, aren’t we nice?)
She gives a brief walkthrough of the process for a typical job. Too brief, in my opinion, but better than nothing, for an ignoramus like me.
I guess I’d like to see something like a series of checklists—“What you need to figure out before you contact an illustrator. How to help illustrators help you. How not to be the client from hell.” Optimized for short attention spans and messy desks.
I’ve got my own hunches and SWAGs, of course, but surely somebody has already rounded the corners off this wheel, no? Is it in the GAG guide? Because I sure don’t have one of those. Is it worth having? My impression of that book has always been that it’s for designers who work in Fantasy Land. Like, I’ve never met anyone who actually gets paid what GAG says is the going rate for stuff, and I’ve gotten absolutely blank looks whenever I’ve tried to refer to what they say is called trade custom. Does this perceived lack of relevance merely reflect the seedy circles I’ve been running in? Should I be sleeping with a copy under my pillow?
Photo: Origami Gecko by /kallu; some rights reserved.
Email me, I’ll go through what I do. GAG, like the pirate code, is more a guideline than actual practice. Use your gut!
The first rule of hiring illustrators is that you don’t talk about hiring illustrators.
My gut usually limits itself to warning me that whatever rate we want to pay an artist or other freelancer is probably less than they’re worth. I am therefore probably the world’s worst negotiator, from the client’s point of view.
(Also, my gut says, “More cake, please?” fairly often.)