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• Brand Vision and Designing Corporate Uniqueness – An Interview with Bruno Schmidt of MetaDesign
• What I am doing is new and exciting - An interview with Tom Rossau
• Meet enPieza! and Some of Their Friends – or How to Help Daily Objects Forget Their Initial Destiny for Fun and Profit
• The value of the material determines the value of the act of cleaning itself - an interview with Jurgen Bey of Studio Makkink & Bey
• The Road is Clear for Colors – an Interview with Lieke Ypma
• I feel more alive in insecurity
• Try not to repeat what already exists
• A sense of balance between pixels and pencil
• The Magic at Sun Rise
• To create means to express your inner self
• Muses of a Midwestern Maker
• We are perfectionists …
• Always start from scratch
• Don't Read This, Go Design Something!" – An Interview with Daniel Pelavi
• Design is a consequence of the process, which in turn is a consequence of the material – An Interview with Max Lamb
• Concrete: Material of the Future!
• Complaining is Silly - An Interview with Stefan Sagmeister
• My starting point is the graphic reworking of surface
• Self-sufficiency, environmental protection and cultural promotion – All in a day’s work for Ute Hübler and Sonja Nitschmann of espírito brasilis
• Designs Unseen – An Interview with "Micronaut" Martin Oeggerli
• The Passagen Interviews – Katja Gehrke
• The Passagen Interviews – Doty Horn
• Taking Security from Effects – an interview with Dieter Hermann of Printcolor
• Designers, have your say! The XYMARA.com Passagen Interviews!
• Personal magic – the art of Alison Ann Martin
• Design Trends in Asia - Nature, Harmony and the Embrace of the New
• What color is a piece of string?
• Straight Lines, Hidden Value
• I feel I gave a little something, a little beauty to the world
• We believe it’s a new industrial revolution
• How about good things? Or interesting things?
• Design also always has a function
• Wood is a Very Modern Material
• I don‘t care what color a car is, just as long as it is black.
• Every design process is inspired by something else, what the designer has seen, heard or felt.
• Aren‘t our color preferences always based on our childhood memories?
• There is a strong need for richness
• We live in an inflatable culture. It‘s hard to know which values are real.
• Colors that create value are trendy ...
• There is a corresponding emotion to each color
• We would love to live outside the city. But we stay and use countryside colors ...
• There are too many colors around. I only need black.
• Interview with Warren Neidich, Artist
• Interview with Simon Husslein, Product Designer
• Interview with Clarissa Tossin, Graphic Designer
• Interview with Uleshka Asher, PingMag Chief Editor/Artist

Finding Beauty in Problem-Solving – An Interview with Illustrator Jean Tuttle

by James Posey

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Jean Tuttle began her illustration career in Manhattan after receiving her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Parsons School of Design in New York City. She has an extensive portfolio of conceptual and narrative illustration, plus icons and infographics for corporate, advertising and publishing markets. Her fresh, fun and colorful digital illustrations have been used by a wide range of clients, from globally recognized newspapers and magazines (such as The New York Times & Time magazine), to corporations such as L'Oréal, Sprint, Trinchero Family Estates, and the United States Bureau of the Census. She has also recently expanded into developing decorative and character-based collections for licensing.

Jean, can you give us some insight as to what it means being a designer based in Denver, Colorado, instead of say, New York City?

When I first moved here, five years ago, I was married, and the transfer was due to my then-husband's accepting a design position here in Denver. We were living in Connecticut at the time, and it came up fairly suddenly. I moved to Colorado never having visited, and knowing virtually nothing about this part of the country. Now I can't imagine a better place to have landed, and can't imagine leaving Denver anytime soon.

Amor Eterno © Jean Tuttle

There is a vibrant art and illustration community here that has made a tremendous difference in my creative life. I had lived out East for nearly thirty years, mostly in and around New York City. And while it was a fantastic place to launch my career due to the concentration of magazines, agencies, and publishing houses there, over time the intensity and pace of life in a big city began to feel overwhelming for me. Plus, of course, technology has made it possible to work with clients from virtually anywhere, versus having to be located down the street from them, so there was no longer a commercial incentive for me to remain there.

While I will always love New York, and have many wonderful friends, colleagues, clients and connections back there, here in Denver it has been easier in some ways to create a supportive "in-person" network, a small circle of fellow artists who all know and like each other, and meet often to hang out, attend an event, have a meal together or talk shop. And at this stage of my life and career that means a great deal to me.

You were first known for your "high-energy, graphic scratchboard style". Can you give us some insight into scratchboarding and how it influenced your work?

I started using scratchboard for a very practical reason: it reproduced far more easily, especially on newsprint, than the subtle black and white pencil work I was doing at the time. So it was primarily to adapt to the needs of a few early clients of mine such as the Village Voice, and The New York Times.

Balancing Fats and Beautiful Baby, both © Jean Tuttle

During this period (late 1970s), having one's work in one of these Manhattan-based publishing venues was wonderful free advertising, as other New York art directors would see the work, often (rightly) assume you were local and would simply look you up in the Manhattan phone book. In my own case, once my scratchboard work had been published a few times, the calls started coming in for my new style, and that pretty much was that.

When I started out using scratchboard, it was in a fairly traditional way, that is, scraping away a black ink coating to gradually reveal the white parts of an image. However, it was hard for me to visualize things as having dimension revealed by light and shadow – which is rather critical when you are working from dark to light, compared to building up your dark areas gradually, as you do in a lot of other media.

Thanks to a former classmate's advice, I soon started using white (un-inked) scratchboard. This allowed me to work as one would with any kind of traditional drawing surface, in other words, drawing the image portion with black ink, building up the dark areas, and scratching away only the little imperfections to make a very clean and graphic silhouette.

How did your work then evolve into a mostly computer-based process?

Around 1987, I began an affiliation with Reactor Art & Design Limited, in Toronto, who represented illustration talent as well as provided design services to their clients. One of the Reactor partners, Louis Fishauf was not only a great designer, art director, and illustrator in his own right, but was also a visionary with regard to computer graphics.

A series of posters for a summer music festival © Jean Tuttle

He is one of the first designers I am aware of that you could say "fell in love" with working with computers. He saw both the enormous potential of using computers and very quickly integrated them into his studio. One day he said to me, "Just imagine if you could make a point so sharp and perfect, or a line that was absolutely smooth ..." and proceeded to describe what you could do with straight lines and bezier curves in the postscript-based drawing program Adobe Illustrator.

Since my scratchboard drawings took a lot of time to draw and to color (via amberlith overlays), and because I cared a lot about achieving a precise and clean look, this idea was extremely appealing to me. Enough so that in 1989 I invested in my first Macintosh workstation, and since that time have used the Mac and Adobe Illustrator exclusively to create my artwork.

How did the switch to computers change your approach or design process?

At first it did not change much at all. Prior to switching to the computer, I approached assignments as essentially design problems which needed to be solved, that is by looking at how the elements within the piece are drawn, stylized, positioned, colored, etc. This was in comparison to a more organic or "painterly" approach to making an image.

So that didn't change. Plus, when I drew on scratchboard, the images were created with straight edges and French curves, instead of with gestural strokes or lines. The computer allowed me to do essentially the same thing, only via vector-based drawing software.

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