Christy Sheppard: Finding Newbies

I assign a bit of illustration for the WIRED FOB. And finding new talent that looks, um, new... or that makes me laugh (definitely a plus)... or that is clever and smart... or is all of those things (email me!) is time consuming and difficult. First, I look at blogs. And then I click. And click and click and click. When I find someone I like, I'll click on their links page, and I'll click on those people's links. Or I'll Google someone's name that I find in an illustration book or in the Times' Book Review or in a foreign magazine I found at the one good San Francisco magazine shop and start my string of clicks from there.

And my favorite illustrator I've found this year from a random string of clicks is Mr. Bingo.

(Say it with a Mary Poppins British accent, it's fantastic).

He's funny and clever and smart, and while his style isn't exactly 'new,' it's sort of a new-old-and-now-new-again. Feels like there's a backlash to the late 90s overly layered, unnecessarily overstyled Attic and Web 1.0 stuff, and our friends out there like Bingo are getting back to pen and ink (or Wacom tablet and pen) basics.

Another favorite of mine is Evah Fan, who graced last year's AI cover, but I'll always remember her from this illustration that I found in someone else's batch of saved promo cards back in 2003.

Again: funny, clever, smart, and I'd go as far as to say new, in that I've certainly never seen such delicate tiny paintings of tigers with camouflage cloaks on before.

And finally, my favorite new illustration trend, the cut-paper-shot-on-simple-studio-background technique. Pixelgarten has a great quirky style that landed them on the cover of Die Gestalten's new Tactile: High Touch Visuals.

And Gluekit's cover for the Print Regional Design Annual is another great example.


So here's exactly what I'm looking at, or, at least, where I begin:

Illustration Mundo
Dirty Mouse
NOTCOT
Drawn!
Design You Trust
Design Observer
FFFFound
Die Gestalten books like Tactile, Data Flow, and Playful Type