JAYLLUSTRATOR
JAYLLUSTRATOR
[Episode 1]
The perfect guest for the first episode of the Creative Minds Project is my good friend Jakob Ritt, aka. Jayllustrator.
Much like his idol Stefan Sagmeister, Jayllustrator is an Austrian graphic designer with a rebellious soul, a dirty mind, and great design skills. Jayllustrator studied advertising in Vienna before he moved to London in 2013 to study at Central Saint Martins. Despite the illustrations that filled out his notebook, Jayllustrator is a great graphic designer with a genuine passion for the classics. As a typography nerd who draws letterforms in his spare time, Jayllustrator takes what he does with the serious dedication of a craftsman, even for the most dreadful client projects. He’s both very down-to-earth and open-minded to exploring new fields, techniques, tools, and subject matters.
For the first episode of the Creative Minds Project, Jayllustrator contributed a notebook filled with his naughty letterforms. This notebook reminds me of a school book of a teenager, who likes to daydream during class. I’m so happy to share wih you the pages from this first episode, and my conversation with Jayllustrator about career crises, being a rebel and the meaning of good design.
Jayllustrator on Instagram
Q: Why/when/how did you start illustrating? Were you going through a career crisis? Bored with your full-time job? Had lots of time to kill? Had lots of sharpies to go through? Wanted to impress the world with your talent? Emotions to express?
A: To be taken seriously as a graphic designer, one needs awareness of rules and best practices. Whether you can — or might be expected to — bend or break them is dependent on the sector you operate in.
Going through my education, I had always imagined myself becoming one of the rebels. Ironically, I found myself in jobs where I was designing for an audience with little taste for explorative work. It took me a while to grasp that while I was seeing benefits in making something look unusual or edgy, my clients did not always share this view.
So, yes, I got bored with my job and thus was going through a little bit of a career crisis.
I have been drawing ever since I can remember. I remember being good (and I mean fucking unbeatable) at Pictionary — which is like visual communication 101. I went through a long phase with graffiti — which stoked my desire to learn how letters and type work. Looking back now, I could say that it was all the experiences with illustration I had throughout life, that led me to graphic design. The deeper I got into the field of traditional graphic design though, the more I started to distance myself from illustration.
Another thing that made graphic design attractive to me, was that I would always be presented with a problem to solve. I do have strong opinions about things, but often feel that these opinions are best kept to myself. To be honest, sometimes I think the world would be a better place if more people thought like that.
Becoming the Jayllustrator for me had cathartic and therapeutic reasons at first. It was a way of distancing myself from work where everything had to be rationalized, aligned to a grid, signed off by a client, and scrutinized by a committee. To be honest I did not even want to publish any of it, as I saw it as “just another person's opinion” and I thought there already were enough of those on the internet. When I did (thanks to my wife for not letting it go) it was a bit of a paradigm shift for me. I was sharing personal thoughts and private occurrences, and people seemed to be interested and entertained. I got a kick out of it and that’s what kept me going.
Q: What a great answer! It made me thinking... You say “to be taken seriously as a graphic designer, one needs awareness of rules and best practices.” This had been my idea of good design too. However, over the years in the industry, my taste in good design has changed — not sure for the better or worse. I now feel like having a good awareness of the rules is not a virtue (especially true for some fields than others). It's even a handicap that restrains your creativity. And to be taken seriously as a designer, you must be free of those rules. So I’m now torn between my modernist self who says “A good designer should be a craftsman” and my postmodernist alter ego who says “A good designer should be an artist and a rule breaker”. What's your conclusion on this?
A: I think that a good designer needs to be both. And I would venture to say, that a rule-breaker who doesn't know the rules would be called an amateur. Haha. I usually find specific restraints quite inspiring, because they challenge my creative ways of thinking.
So my bottom line would be that a good designer has to be a craftsperson as well as a rule-breaker, and those two personalities need to coexist, emerging with varying intensities according to the nature of the project. Maybe what makes a good designer is the ability to make a reasonable judgement on which personality to unleash on a project-by-project basis.
Q: I was surprised to hear that you were holding back your illustrations to save the internet from “another person’s opinions“. Do you think us publishing creative work, maybe to a compulsive degree, oversaturates the rest of the world?
A: Maybe that was just my initial excuse or a pseudo-critical way to cover up my insecurities. A collaborator of yours and friend of ours has said that it is the responsibility of creatives to share their work with the world. I tend to sometimes fall into a bit of a "speak-when-your're-spoken-to" mentality, and after the initial resistance, I think my Jayllustrator alter ego has helped me quite a bit to counteract this. Yes, there is an over-saturation of opinions going around, but that's just a consequence of the age we're living in and I guess I'll have to (and started to) adjust.
Q: You mentioned your experiments with street art. I'm fascinated. Tell me more!
A: Hmm, where do I start? I just got into it through friends and was really captivated by the urban, gritty and potentially critical and subversive nature of graffiti. Ironically most of my work was (and still is) in sketchbooks only. I have done a few pieces on walls, but these were either commissioned or in areas where graffiti was legal. I did get arrested once, for painting a zebra crossing on to a street.
Q: And finally, this might be the one that I need to hear personally, but you mentioned being bored at your job. How do you feel about your career now? Did Jayllustrator save you from your crisis? Or more generally, can a creative career lead to sustainable creative fulfilment? And are you hopeful for yourself?
A: When I started being the Jayllustrator, I was terribly bored at my job. Continuously posting, interacting with my viewers and maintaining a consistent creation schedule has definitely helped me. At first, I thought it was just a successful distraction, escapism so to speak. But as time went on I realised that the unrestricted explorations I did while being the Jayllustrator kind of helped inspire and inform the work I was doing in my day job. I got more confident with my style, and use it at my real job sometimes – a slightly toned-down version featuring fewer genitals, of course. Unfortunately, now that I've kind of integrated my Jayllustrator alter ego into my main professional self I've kind of entered a bit of a torpor again. *Insert sound of tumbleweeds rolling through my Insta*.
I definitely think a creative career can be creatively fulfilling, and maybe what makes it so is that it motivates us to constantly try out new and exciting stuff. What scares me the most is becoming stagnant in what I do – this is the gripe I have at my current job. Oh, maybe I just had an epiphany. There is a fight going on within myself between the perfectionist who feels that certain aspects of my work can always be improved, and the futurist, who just wants to trash the status quo and explore new frontiers. Ultimately probably balance is key. But I am always hopeful.
