Re: Doing your own graphics (an illustrators perspective)

[Bonni Graham <bonnig -at- IX -dot- NETCOM -dot- COM>]

Michael Maloney has made several good points about using illustrators.
John Posada has made several good points about when its not feasible.
George Hayhoe pretty neatly summed up the whole puppy.

However, in dicussing this with my employees, we wondered how much of
the argument is based on illustrators within a hardware environment vs
within a software environment.

I would never consider doing my own hardware illustrations -- I can't
draw for beans.  However, for software manuals, 95% of my illustrations
are screen captures.  Do I really need to outsource screen captures to
an illustrator? Can I justify to my client the cost of using an
illustrator for 5% of the graphics work, when that largely consists of
something like the relational database diagram some of you have seen?

Realistically probably not.  It seems to me that asking a professional
illustrator to perform screen captures (remember, most of the
illusrtations in a software manual are screens) is a little like asking
a professional writer to make photocopies.

I wonder how much of this discussion is one group saying, "I create
oranges and you should always use oranges because oranges are better"
and the other saying, "But I don't need oranges for this project; our
customers actually eat apples and a couple of tangerines, which I can
do myself"?

Just a thought...

Bonni Graham
Manual Labour
San Diego, CA
bonnig -at- ix -dot- netcom -dot- com

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