Q1. What opportunities and motivations led you to establish Mimaster illustrazione? Could you introduce the courses offered by your school? What difficulties did you encounter during such projects, and what gains did you make? Could you share your insights?
Mimaster Illustrazione was founded in Milan in 2009 by a group of Italian illustrators, who came together as part of a studio called Bandalarga. I had been collaborating with them since 2005, working on promoting all aspects of the culture of illustration. It is during this time that we quickly realized that there was a lack of education courses dedicated exclusively to illustration in the Italian market. In the early 2000s, illustration courses focused entirely on children illustration. It dawned on us that it was the right time to start a new series of courses, that will focus on other areas such as covers, books, editorial illustration for magazines and newspapers and anything that was not just for children.
It was not easy in the first years of the course to get people to understand this paradigm shift, get them to understand that there was the need for a new educational model. However, in those same years, the language of illustration, internationally, began to experience a new effervescence after the lackluster and unhappy years dominated by online stock images, mostly photographic. At the time we also saw that artists and art directors started to becomes teachers too. Our offer - within this changing cultural climate - allowed Mimaster Illustrazione to become a reference point for those who want to pursue the profession of being an illustration.
Today, besides being one of the founders of Mimaster Illustrazione, I am also the educational coordinator along with my partner Ivan Canu, the course director.
The Mimaster concept is based on the following three pillars:
- the design of images for the most common types of editorial media: illustrated books, illustrations for magazines and newspapers, covers etc..
- connecting high profile international art directors (who come in as teachers and mentors) to illustration students, thus creating a bridge between academia and industry
- the teaching of professional tools, such as portfolio organization, editorial workflows, market dynamics, and publishing contract rules and copyright laws.
Bringing established illustrators and art directors to the course allows students to develop their skills through real briefs and experience all the various processes associated with delivering professional work. The course, conducted in partnership with the Arnoldo and Alberto Mondadori Foundation, lasts 6 months and takes place partly online and partly in person in Milan.
In our last 15 years, Mimaster Illustrazione has had the honor of hosting some of the greatest international illustrators and art directors who have been able to offer students a varied view of market experiences and design paths. Just to name a few of the illustrators: Lorenzo Mattotti, Anita Kunz, Emiliano Ponzi, Lisbeth Zwerger, Noma Bar, Olimpia Zagnoli, Katsumi Komagata, Pablo Amargo, Christoph Niemann; and among the art directors: Nicholas Blechmann (The New Yorker), Stefano Cipolla (L'Espresso), Birthe Steinbeck (Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin), Cristiano Guerri (Feltrinelli), Cecilia Flegenheimer (Mondadori), Alice Beniero (Il Saggiatore), Cathy Olmedillas (Studio Anorak), Aris Papatheodorou (Le Monde), Jason Ramirez (Penguin Random House), Matthew Dorfman (The New York Times).
On top of that, in 2017, and thanks to the intuition of Elena Pasoli, the current director of the Bologna Children's Book Fair, who recognized the value of our idea and shared its vision, we came up with an idea to expand our offering and strengthen our commitment to the illustration world: The Illustrators Survival Corner. This new project was created with the aim of giving, during book fair events, a home to the international community of illustrators, and an opportunity for them to meet professionals. There, we run masterclasses with high profile illustration professionals, creativity workshops and portfolio reviews.
I am very pleased to recall that the first foreign edition of The Illustrators Survival Corner was held in China for CCBF in 2018, inaugurating a fruitful collaboration that continues to attract a growing audience of illustrators.
It has now been hosted in many bookfairs around the world, including Guadalajara (Mexico), Montreal (Canada), Sharjah (UAE), Vilnius (Lithuania), New Delhi (India), Frankfurt (Germany) as part of The Bologna Grand Tour program organized by the Bologna Children's Book Fair.
There are now thousands of illustrators who attend the program of The Illustrators Survival Corner every year, during the Bologna fair and its international stops.
We have also published a series of guides, The Illustrated Survival Guide, which provides practical advice and guidelines for those who want to work in the illustration and books industry.
Q2. Where does your passion for the communication and exhibition come from? Since entering this industry, have your attitude and significance towards this career changed? Could you share your observations during this time?
I have a passion for what I call ‘cultural design’, ie how design plays a role in culture because it establishes a dialogue, stimulates curiosity and instill doubts in the minds of the public.
One the first illustration projects I worked on in 2006 was in collaboration with the Italian Illustrators Association. Carpi, a small Italian town, kept in its municipal archives a 19th Century register that collected descriptions of homeless people who were stopped by the police. They kept a record of who they were, what they looked like and what they had done in terms of minor offences. These pages represent very valuable material for historians and scholars. The request made by the municipal archive of Carpi to the Italian Illustrators Association was to make this content appealing to a more general audience, in short, to find a form of communication that would bring this treasure of historical documentation to the general public. We decided to ask a group of illustrators to create a portrait, in the format of a passport photo, of these Italians from the late 19th century based on their physical descriptions in the register. We exhibited the work which was incredibly well received. We also created a catalog of the exhibition for which we asked a group of writers to invent likely biographies for each of the people featured. To this day, I am so proud of this work as it goes to the core of the sort of cultural design activities I like to think of, and which provides a good balance between historical content, fun, and creativity.
Q3. What changes do you think have occurred in the illustration art and publishing industries since you started? What effects do you think AI has had on the art industry? What is your attitude and opinion on the development of AI creation?
There have been so many changes in our industries since the beginning of my career 15 years ago. The most significant one has been the slow decline of the use of illustrations and photographs from online image banks. The reasons for this decline are probably linked to the generally low quality of these visual products and the extreme generality of the subjects. There have been very famous cases where different companies used the same image to communicate very different products and services, as if the image no longer had any referential value to the content communicated. This means that top international brands have rediscovered how bespoke illustration have a unique ability to tell stories and tell their values in a commercial context.
In children and young adult illustration, we have seen a resurgence of themes related to the protection of planet Earth, diversity, and representation. There have also been language changes with forms of migration/hybridization of authors, mainly experts in editorial illustration or comic storytelling, who have tried their hand at picture books, enriching the genre with new visual alphabets. Finally, picture books have left their traditional niche as a product dedicated only to children to become an object of passion and cult even for adults.
The landscape today is certainly dominated by the rise of generative AI technologies. The debate on the subject is very heated, especially regarding the protection of the intellectual property of authors and illustrators whose content has been used to train AI tools. More generally, the advent of AI has opened up enormous questions about what will happen to creative professions once this technological revolution is fully realized.
As with all historical phenomena of such magnitude, there are many possible predictions, and the degree of accuracy decreases proportionally to the vastness of the sectors the phenomenon will impact. Limiting ourselves to the field of illustration, it is undeniable that all image production with low added human value (I think of certain packaging, mainstream product and service communication, and even mass-market editorial production that focuses on sales quantity rather than quality) will be the domain of AI, which has notable qualities on its side: speed, cost-effectiveness, and ease of production management. However, the authorial voices of illustration, those who can distill a personal, human touch, and those who can reference culture elaborated through intellectual experience and practice, will not fade.
One wonders, therefore, whether, notwithstanding the burning issues related to copyright and for which national governments together with international bodies are trying to find a solution with more or less happy results, one can imagine a future of collaboration between the human author and AI. On one hand, the quality of the generative outcome still depends on the quality and sophistication of the human prompt. On the other hand, the amount of time this technology allows to save by doing the groundwork could possibly be used by artists to focus their time on refining a visual language and experiencing richer cultural experiences, which at the end, are the foundations of imagination.
To this effect, we are working to incorporate specific teachings dedicated to the use of AI in the service of the illustrator's craft within our course, with the aim of making new illustrators aware of the challenges, risks, and potential of this new technological tool.
Q4. What qualities do you think an outstanding work or project should possess? What standards do you use to determine a work is good? Do you have any advice for illustrators participating in competitions for the first time?
Instinctively, one tends to think of the aesthetic criterion as the primary element for evaluating an image, with its merciless duality: I like it, I don't like it, or beautiful vs. ugly. This judgment is inevitably tied to personal taste and is thus inherently subjective.
In my opinion, there are at least two other criteria that can provide an evaluation less influenced by the discretion of aesthetic taste. For both criteria, it is necessary to adopt a viewpoint that considers the illustrated image as a communication device, thus recognizing its project, and not merely as an aesthetic manifestation.
A good project is one that fully accomplishes the communication task required by the story or the brief from which it derives. That is, it can convey the emotions and atmosphere, transmit values and ideas coherently and effectively. In this, the image is not ancillary to the text, it is not a caption, but represents a parallel and supportive storytelling with the written word. To use a metaphor to explain this concept, we could say that the illustrator's freedom in executing a brief or a children's story lies in the interline between the very phrases of the text from which it derives. That white space is the arena, the boxing ring, where creativity and visual design can flow. Continuing with this image, the lines that enclose the interline represent the boundaries beyond which visual narration becomes unfaithful to the text it is telling, over-interpreting and visually adding something the text does not say, does not narrate.
A second evaluation element for most cultural and creative products - especially if complex and intended for a broad audience - is that they possess two distinct levels of meaning in visual design. The first level is that of entertainment, aesthetic enjoyment, ie. what is seen at first glance even with very few cultural skills in reading images. This is the surface level, which reaches any type of audience and must indeed capture their attention, seduce them. The second level of design, however, is understood later and concerns the symbols, references to other artists, allusions to the history of art, and generally to other cultural works present in that specific image. It involves an intellectual decoding, that goes beyond aesthetics. The expert observer, able to enjoy both levels, will experience a fulfilling and unforgettable experience. The viewer, with limited cultural reading tools, will nevertheless have aesthetic pleasure and perhaps the desire to understand more about what they are observing, to deepen their knowledge.
I believe that the role of any cultural or creative endeavours is to raise questions and curiosity in the audience, to stimulate them to continue their journey towards knowledge and to continue the dialogue that the vision of that visual communication has sparked in them. Designing cultural products is essentially about constructing mechanisms to facilitate the dialogue between the contents of human knowledge and the users of that content.
There is only one piece of advice I feel like giving young illustrators regarding illustration contests: participate! Contests are opportunities for comparison, chances to showcase one's visual language, and begin to test oneself. We always encourage our students at Mimaster Illustrazione to participate in different contests each year, to make this practice a habit, a usual tool in their professional toolkit as illustrators.
Q5. In your opinion, what efforts should creators or cultural industry practitioners make to have a greater impact? When choosing collaborators, what qualities and abilities do you value more?
The question is indeed crucial and would require a discussion that goes far beyond the space of an interview. I will focus on a point that is very dear to me.
The crucial point for cultural content producers in the coming years will be the battle against banality, the flatness of texts and images. I am referring in particular to the vast amount of content that will be generated through AI and whose effects are already beginning to be visible. Without human intervention that hybridizes and intervenes in the creative process, AI products all fall on a qualitative line of constant and dignified mediocrity, and this happens for strictly technical reasons of the tool: AI provides results on a static basis, always offering the most common and frequent result it has identified in the vast amount of data on which it has been trained.
In particular, for creatives who decide to use AI as a tool for their design, it will be necessary to refine their sensitivity as art directors in addition to that of authors. In fact, besides providing generally banal answers, AI is not currently capable of exercising synthetic thinking—that is, it behaves like a young student who manages to produce a dozen good creative solutions for an assigned problem but does not know how to choose the final one. And it is not even capable, unless guided with skill and precision, of refining its final proposal to achieve a result of excellence. In this sense, therefore, the creative must transform into an art director within the collaborative relationship with AI and hybridize the design process with their intervention.
About collaborators, I try to surround myself with people who, in addition to having solid professional skills, are also able to interact effectively with other people. The engine of cultural design is fueled by the quality of relationships between beings. Knowing how to engage in dialogue with others in a curious and respectful manner is an incredibly valuable quality in a collaborator. Couple that with tenacity and the ability to solve problems creatively. If we wanted to summarize, almost as if it were a geometric axiom, the job description of a cultural operator, we could write: tame entropy.
