TODAY’S ILLUSTRATION.
REPRESENTATIONS OF A DESIGNER’S WAY OF DESIGN THINKING

This paper intends to contribute to the general issue of design thinking by discussing how today’s design recovers and uses illustration as a language (with it’s own syntax and semantics) in order to communicate visually. It results from an ongoing research project that is studying illustration in design and the way in which design can offer innovative solutions by using this expressive resource.

Efficiency and formal synthesis, which reached their climax with modernism, are today tending to adapt to the current times of idleness, individualism, self-reference and the desire for singularity. It is in this context that formal solutions using illustration appear, breaking away from the truth that photographic imagery formerly sought. These “pictorial narratives” offer stimuli to the receiver and initiate associations, images and memories that support thought, close that which we find in the patterns of emotional design (Donald Norman).

Contrary to the traditional sense of illustration, which is to decorate and bring to light a unique meaning, contemporary illustration contributes to the appearance of a symbolic level, starting with its own mode of design thinking (Nigel Cross, Nagai and Noguchi, Gabriela Goldschmidt). The illustrator is a construer of senses and he achieves this through drawing illustration. The illustrator is, in this way, illustrating himself.

After the initial euphoria of the potential solutions that digital technologies were offering, today there is a return to hand made illustration and to the formal valorisation of drawing by analogical means. It is almost as if there has been a refusal of artificial and exterior means and the body has been called upon once more to participate and become involved in the creative act. (Walter Benjamin).

Illustration as a communicational artefact is innovative in the sense that it is the graphical fixation of a transitory order. Transitory because it represents the manner in which its author manifests his “inner order”: transitory because it depends on the receiver to complete it (an “outer order”). Illustration realises itself as an interface between these inner and outer orders.

In this paper, examples that reference the absence of design illustration and examples that reference their recourse and importance today are presented.

The interpretation of these examples contributes to the clarification of the proposed objectives.

Keywords: illustration, design thinking, drawing, image, innovation

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