I used to start illustrating too early.
Now, before I create a single scene, I ask 6 simple questions that help me turn a manuscript into a clear, engaging illustration.
I’m sharing the process in my #descriptchallenge entry. 🎨📖
What’s one step in your creative process you wish you had learned sooner?
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Costumes Parisiens 2026, now in motion: George Barbier's 1913 fashion plates, dressed and animated for 2026.
In 1913 George Barbier drew the latest Paris fashion for the Journal des Dames et des Modes: flat stencil colour, one elegant figure per plate, and a caption announcing the look, like "Robe d'intérieur" or "Manteau de théâtre". I found his Costumes Parisiens plates at the Rijksmuseum, where they are in the public domain, cropped ten of them down to the bare stencil and built a Recraft V4 Style from them. Costumes Parisiens 2026 keeps his poses and his captions and dresses them for how we actually live now: a silk blouse over pyjama trousers for the video call, a red delivery backpack worn over a fur-trimmed coat, a theatre coat embroidered with 99 unread badges, a necklace of charging cables, earbuds worn as pearl drops, a ring light carried like a parasol. This version brings four plates to life with Recraft's video tools, set to Erik Satie. Same magazine, a hundred and thirteen years later; only the accessories have changed.
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I led the end-to-end redesign of the FarmVille marketplace at Zynga, from early hand sketches through implementation. The goal was to modernize the UI while supporting seasonal reskins, flash sales, and an ever-growing set of monetization features without breaking usability. I designed the information architecture, wireframes, visual system, and a flexible skinning framework that allowed the market to be rethemed in days instead of weeks. I also designed the flash sale and promotion system, which drove major revenue spikes and was later adopted across other Zynga titles. The redesigned market ultimately supported a feature responsible for over $1B in revenue at peak scale.
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