Will Hill

I’ve been invited by David Jury, editor of Parenthesis, to write an essay on editorial illustration, based upon my experiences as a freelance illustrator in London in the 70s and 80s. Thinking about my ‘previous life’ before I moved toward typographic design and took up a full -time teaching post, I realised how much of my work has been concerned with messages and interpretation, and designed to be ‘read’ in one sense or another, whereas I’m now starting to make work that exists simply to be looked at and experienced visually. Meanwhile, revisiting my illustration portfolio has prompted some reminiscences about the design practices of a very different era.
Fifty years ago I was a student on an illustration course – formally termed ‘vocational graphics’ – after which I moved to London and started to take my portfolio to art editors.

Over the next few years I worked for The Observer, Time Out, the Radio Times, New Scientist and many others, before moving to larger jobs for design consultancies and then into book cover design, in the course of which illustration gave way to a developing interest in typography, and I began some part-time teaching.
The working life of an illustrator in the pre-digital years of the last century differed from present practices in many ways, both in the media and materials we used and the way we made contact with our clients.
I’m working to a September deadline and the article will be published toward the end of the year; I will post when it comes out.