Welcome to the Before You Build Your Website Series, where we talk to a few people in the design and marketing industry about some of the overlooked aspects of good web design. From copywriting to visual branding to finally building your site, this blog series will give you an inside peek at all the value packed into a powerful marketing tool: your website.
Madison LaRose is an illustrator with 4+ years of experience, specializing in children’s books, typography, and design. Her work is developed digitally or traditionally with gouache, acrylic, or colored pencil in order to create whimsical and friendly illustrations. She currently lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Marta Gravier: How did you get your start in illustration?
Madison LaRose: I got interested in it junior year of high school, because of the art classes I was taking. I was really the artist, Alphonse Mucha. I guess you could call him an illustrator, but I would say he’s more of a fine artist. I got really into doing master copies of his work. Eventually, it led me to artists like Jamie Hewlett, who does the art for the Gorillaz. I started to fall in love with illustration, in general.
I didn’t want to do animation, because I felt that my art wasn’t ready or good enough, yet. I needed to focus on my illustration skills before doing animation. So I went into illustration as my major at New Hampshire Institute of Art for a semester, then I switched to MassArt in Boston. I did a lot of prompt illustrations. MassArt is a little bit different, because you get a prompt of a fake or real article, and then you have to illustrate it. Mainly, until my senior year, I was doing a lot of prompts until I was able to do my own work.
My thesis was based on poetry. And there were more paintings, which is a lot different than what I do now. My last semester of MassArt, I got into children’s book illustration. So I started to do stories like Thumbelina, and then I decided to go to do my master’s. Because I was getting into children’s illustration, and I wanted to focus on that without having to worry about making money. I wanted to eventually be a professor, and you need a master’s in the States to be a professor. Now, I’m doing illustration and design work for clients.
Marta: How are color and design style used to cater to different audiences?
Madison: I’ll compare it to children’s illustration, and then more adult. For children, it’s a lot of bright colors. You want very fun and eye-catching stuff for children to be interested in. Style wise, you want kind of cutesy things. And not all children’s illustrations are like that. There’s more mature looking styles, but for commercialized work, I would say it’s very big heads, really large features, and small bodies.
For like other audiences, like for editorial, you would do a more semi-realistic style. I would say the Amazon style would be another good example, or Google. They do the vector looking people – very sharp and bendy people. It depends on what’s trending in either category. Because it will always change in my opinion.
Marta: Why should a business owner care about design when putting their business online?
Madison: Say you have a business that sells clothing – customers don’t want to be on a website that is super confusing, or really hard to navigate. There are some websites I’ve been on for online shopping where I don’t know where the shopping cart is. And that’s how you are able to buy the products – you end up just leaving the website because it’s too difficult, especially for older users who may not know a lot about technology and stuff.
You want to be accessible for people who might be colorblind, and even “hard of seeing”. When someone’s colorblind, you don’t want to use colors that are very similar. Say you have brown text, and then a green or a red background, they’re probably not going to be able to see it very well. So you want to use colors that are high contrast enough.
Marta: I would love it if you could tell me about a recent project you did, and a little bit about your process and how you approached it.
Madison: I just did a project with this studio for patterns for dog collars. It was for Laura Tott. That made me a little bit nervous, just because she seemed kind of famous. This was my first client like that. I didn’t really talk to the client directly because I worked through a studio, and the art director talked to them directly. They pass along the information to me.
She wanted a moon concept for patterns. So I did three sketches of the moon and stars, moon and rocketships, and the moon and different planets. And she chose the moon and rocketships, and then color wise, she kind of let me do my own thing.
Then this other design was clouds as a concept. And so I sent her another three variations of it. The one that she picked was a rainbow design, and then she told me the colors to use for that. I had to work around doing that, because it was a specific type of pink. I had to convince her to go a bit lighter in order for the other colors to pop out more.
Marta: What advice would you give to business owners working with a designer or Illustrator for the first time?
Madison: I would be very clear about what you want. It might be helpful to make a design brief, like a page long with what you want out of it. Say you’re designing a website, then specify, oh, I want it to be a single page where you just scroll down, and no tabs. You could even take photos of other websites that made you think, Oh, I love the style of this, so that the artist knows, okay, this is what they want.
Color palettes are really helpful, too. I would just be very clear about what you want. Don’t say, oh, just do whatever, because what will happen is that you do whatever. And then the client says, oh, I don’t like that. Try to get very clear with what you want, because you’re just going to be wasting time.
Thank you for tuning into the Before You Build Your Website series! I hope you found this interview as helpful as I did. If you haven’t already, sign up for my newsletter to stay up to date on design tips, blog posts, and projects I’m working on.