On May 24 I had the pleasure of speaking at the Eidosmedia Customer Meeting in Milan, Italy. To my surprise, there was Jack Brougham, a British illustrator, in the audience and charged with capturing what the conference speakers’ said and turning it into beautiful illustrations. I was quite impressed with mine and blogged about it here. Take look at how Jack illustrated my keynote presentation:
I became curious and asked Jack these three questions about his work:
1 . You have a very interesting and unusual line of work: I assume that you wanted to be an illustrator from an early age, but illustrating the contents of conferences? How did you get to do that?
Jack:
It was a complete accident! I heard that an old acquaintance was doing it and it sounded like something I might be able to do, so I badgered him to bring me along on a job and I’ve just kept going from there.
I had been trying to make a living from drawing for years and doing this was the first thing i stumbled across that fit with my temperament. I enjoy the pressure of producing stuff fast, and getting to eavesdrop on talks and presentations on all sort of arcane and obscure subjects is a real privilege.
I think temperament is a much bigger factor in this line of work than skill or training (although those help.) Not everyone who is a good drawer can work in public. My theory is that me and my colleagues are all the people who couldnt concentrate on school lessons unless we were doodling all over our exercise books. And now I get paid to doodle in public. So it was worth all the detention.
2. What is the biggest challenge for a conference illustrator?
Jack:
Two things- stress and boredom.
Stress because the clock is always ticking, you’re trying to understand what’s being presented while also taking notes, while also trying to think of a decent visual idea to illustrate the last point, while also actually drawing up another idea. It’s a lot for one brain and two hands to handle, like juggling while spinning plates and reciting poetry all at once.
Boredom is a challenge because when you’re drawing so much, at speed and under pressure, it’s easy to fall back on familiar visual formulas and grow disenchanted with the work you are doing. When this happens the work suffers, and it’s no fun to do, so there is a constant pressure to impose constraints on yourself to keep the work interesting.
I might decide on a certain visual theme that runs through the illustration, or choose to use only typography, or incorporate references to the conference location into every vignette, for instance. Anything to try and avoid drawing the same old stuff. It never works of course- my drawings always ends up looking like I did them.
3. Have you ever experienced a conference with a theme that was nearly impossible to illustrate?
Jack:
I don’t think so. It’s a matter of how, rather than what. I think drawing in the context of conferences is a narrative medium. It hopefully serves to bring material to life so it will stick in the minds of the people who were there. If research or ideas are presented just as data, with no sense of the story behind them, it can be a struggle to create a compelling illustration.
This happens more often than you might think. Some people are really attached to their graphs, and I don’t blame them given how hard they have worked doing the research that went into them. It does surprise me however how frequently people presenting at conferences think graphs alone are enough, and neglect to say clearly what prompted them to carry out their research in the first place.
Mario’s speaking engagements
Here are places where I will be taking the message of mobile storytelling in the weeks ahead:
June 12, NEC Media City, Bergen, Norway, Storytelling workshop for Editors
June 13, Fortellingens kraft 2019, Bergen, Norway, Long form Mobile Storytelling for Writers
July 11, Florida Media Conference, St. Petersburg, FL, Keynote for editors: The mobile first newspaper strategy.
Mario’s weekend rituals…..
Monocle interviews me about what I do on a typical weekend (is there such a thing? Not for someone like me who is seldom in the same location twice. But I gave it my best shot, for what may come as a normal weekend, when I am home in New York! Enjoy.
https://monocle.com/minute/2019/04/27/
Pre-order The Story
The newspaper remains the most powerful source of storytelling on the planet. But technology threatens its very existence. To survive, the Editor must transform, adapt, and manage the newsroom in a new way. Find out how, pre-orderThe Story by Mario Garcia, chief strategist for the redesign of over 700 newspapers around the world.
Order here:
https://thaneandprose.com/shop-the-bookstore?olsPage=products%2Fthe-story
An interview of interest
http://www.itertranslations.com/blog/2019/3/11/fd60ybflpvlqrgrpdp5ida5rq0c3sp
TheMarioBlog post #3065