Episode 26: “Communicating Ideas Instantly”, John Holcroft, UK
John Holcroft is an editorial illustrator who has worked in a variety of mediums and styles since 1996. In 2001 he started working digitally but it wasn’t until 2010 that he created his current ‘screen print’ style. John’s clients include BBC, Reader’s Digest, Financial Times, Walker books, The Guardian, The Economist, Nike, Conde Nast, New York Times, Honda, Wall Street Journal and many more.
Illustration is the perfect medium for expressing important issues.
“You get instant communication with the viewer, and the image can then be shared. The downside can be that the image is misconstrued. People have different interpretations, so it's important to get it right the first time.”
Image 1: Ladder of Success
“It's about success and failure, the two going hand in hand, you can't appreciate success unless you've experienced failure. And you have to learn from failure to succeed. It is interesting because I’ve done about three versions of this over the years. It's one of my favourite illustrations.”
Image 2: Barcode Loggers
“It's about the plight of using the world's resources to feed the retail industry, and our shopping habits. It's not just trees, it's everything. Why are we producing more plastic rather than recycling it?.”
Image 3: Escape
“It's looking at changing careers, and people getting away from the humdrum of computers that dominate our lives. I was looking at my keyboard, I saw the word escape and that's what inspired me.”
Image 4: Recycle Lie
“I was shocked to read this post by Greenpeace that we only recycle a small percentage of our plastic. So people take it upon themselves to recycle carefully all their plastics and paper, but then you find out that a lot is just incinerated. But the thing that really piqued my ears was the fact that we've been selling our recycling to overseas and paying companies to recycle for us only to find that it's gone into the wrong hands and ended up being dumped into the ocean.”
“So as you can see from the image, there's this dad and his young lad who is happy and you know, blissfully ignorant that what they think is recycling is actually going into wildlife. You can see the shadow is a pelican. The pelicans seemed to fit the bill better because it has a big mouth.”
Image 5: Rainbow of Hope
“Well, I think it was during COVID when I did this. And as you can imagine, everything was bleak. I think we just needed that little bit of optimism. So that's why I produced that. It's basically about hope and optimism, making something good out of a bad situation. I think a lot of people appreciated that they could see straight away. It couldn't be about anything else but that.”
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