In the same way animation movies are many times (mis)labelled as cartoons intended for children only, the genre of illustration is also not limited to the universe of storybooks. On the contrary – it’s enough to think of the popular comics intended for adults. This form of imaging is a potential means of storytelling, in which the creator can call to life a whole group of fictitious or real events and characters freely – the story becomes visibly perceptible via their interpretation.
The illustrations belonging to a given story pull us out of the world of fantasy, and take us to a different universe: to a place where we only have to consume what we see. And this is a double-edged sword: illustrations can serve as crutches when we would like to understand and interpret a complex process, but can also act as “pre-packed, ready-made food”. We can get lost in the stories told with images – in lack of written words –, but we can also get free: the same way a story written on the pages of a book appears differently in different people’s minds, we also interpret the line of images seen on paper or on the screen differently. What stories do we make out of the images portraying the world of “Blade Runner”? And what would a winter love story be like if told by a writer instead of a graphic artist? Exciting and diverse selection from Moscow to Basel.
Kitti Mayer
design theorist
Illustration for RBC | Moscow, Russia
Katya Dorokhina
The story of a little mouse | Cherkasy, Ukraine
Nataliia Voloshyna
Chemical Reactions | Milan, Italy
Dangiuz
Metro Madrid | Madrid, Spain
Birgit Palma
WINTER LOVE | Basel, Switzerland
Jamie Oliver Aspinall
360-degree panorama over nature in a forest near Prague
Favorite interiors of the week_30
