Work with Illustrators & Designers

I’ll admit it, some of the graphics on this site are AI-generated.

You may have seen the very silly image at the top of the Blogroll, or the watercolour images used for my Weak Notes and Short Thorts. All AI. I’m sorry. The rest are all more organically made.

I would like to replace them, I used to be arty - I mean I could totally make something like that myself - but I’m just so short on time that I never get around to it. And I’m so out of practice that I feel I’m just not going to be happy with anything I come up with.

I decided the other day that what really needed a logo or header image (or something to double as both) was whimsica11y.net - a side project that really isn’t getting the love it deserves. And also, I want to have some stickers made. I like stickers.

And I do like drawing! So I drew a whole bunch of doodles while watching the kids. I wasn’t finding a design direction that I liked, so I laid them down for a while. Until one day I picked the pencil up again and BOOM drew out something I really liked the look of!

What made me really happy with this final design was two things - one was having a shape where I could incorporate a rainbow, and secondly as I extended the y underneath the rest of a11y it made me think of link underlines, and reminded me of this slightly profane shirt by the talented Heydon.

The challenge was then turning it into a clean, reusable, resizable graphic. I wanted it as an SVG. And I was already feeling tired-as-an-emotion even imagining doing that part.

Well, eventually I remembered that I am in enough of a privileged position that I can pay someone to do this bit for me, and I happened to know someone who would really do it justice 💜

With thanks to Andy Carolan for taking my drawing and SVG-ing it for me, and adding just a bit of his own touch, elevating it further! He was also very gracious about splitting it up into several layers, that I could go in to add and remove parts or change the colours easily myself.

I’m still experimenting with the colours, and we’ll see whether I’ll also use the 3D version or not - but for now on whimsica11y.net it’s been given the Disability Pride flag treatment :)

So instead of “prompt engineering”, and trying to finagle an AI into producing the image you want from its scrapings of the entire internet - consider drawing something! Then find yourself a friendly illustrator.

It doesn’t matter if your drawing is scrappy, these people can create wonders from simple ideas. You can then work with them to build something that’s still very much yours as much as it is theirs. There’s so much joy in having your own work returned to you, made way better!