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I'm in this illustration class being taught by a boomer, and he insists on us making these 15 page "process notebooks" for all of our projects that include images of everything we've ever even thought about searching on the internet and descriptions of our whole drawing process. He insists that they're a thing in illustration, but I literally can't find anything about them online outside of engineers using them to document the design process for themselves. If you're an illustrator or know an illustrator, can you please tell me if these are actually a thing? Because it feels like one of those things that college teachers think are very important but in reality aren't even really done in the industry.

>>15528 I'm sure they will decide to let you teach the class once they realize how much smarter you are than a dumb old boomer.

We have to do that for art class too, but so far no person working in arts I've talked to actually used those. Be it graphics designers or illustrators, most only remembered them from school. I haven't spoken to that many illustrators and more graphics designers, but still. I guess that, atleast in high school, their sole purpose is to not have us waste our time in the hours we're supposedly working and can't be given an oral grade and the teachers need something to substitute that. Sometimes they're a little bit helpful to bump up the grade though, for example when you've skimped on the actual art or it didn't turn out well, so you can cheat a bit. Still hate them though

>>15528 >He insists that they're a thing in illustration They can be in graphics design, especially product packaging. But it's less about being useful and more about demonstrating you actually have been working and not just jerking off for the last week and threw something out last night. That way people can justify paying you to the HR guys. By the same token, in education the idea is to have something to actually grade you on; anybody with reasonable talent can make decent final piece of work - that's not what you're being judged on. You're being judged on how you take a concept and develop it. Just like in mathematics you can end up with the wrong answer, but if you show a lot of sensible working out with just a few +/- signs getting jumbled, you can still be given a high mark. See it for what it, play the game. It's not about teaching you anything. It's to show you have been taught.

>>15534 I don't think I'm any more qualified than he is, but being too old can be a legitimate issue if the class happens to be career oriented. In my experience, older professors tend not to really be properly "connected" to the current state of the field they're teaching, and if they are it's in a very particular way that doesn't give them a wide enough view of the industry.

>>15528 He probably just wants you to describe your process so he can review your workflow, which sounds like a good idea.

>>15528 man, i've been trying to write a response, but you make me so angry, i can't even. it's probably because i just spent a few months interviewing and filtering "illustrators" like yourself, and i still have ways to go. literally every single designer and illustrator in my company has a process notebook. they are mostly all digital, but it doesn't change the general idea. they will dump pictures that inspired them, jot small paragraphs, that can later be used to articulate the idea, put scans of intermediate work, including the scans of failed attempts, of dead ends, they will also keep wacom sketches. if it's folder based they'll keep a dozen of historical versions of the same document they'll be ultimately working with. this makes them both effective illustrators, since they can review and improve their own work, but also effective communicators, since they can easily explain the concept to the client using supporting material (rather than trying to pull it out if their asses the night before the meeting). if i were to go right now to any one of them and ask them for a physical "process notebook" for a particular design or illustration, they'd probably be excited, they'll prep up a slide deck, they'll assemble the entirety of team, you won't be able to stop them, because, man, to be able to share intricate details of your work with other people you like and respect, that's the ultimate joy. change your ways, change you ways you fuarrrking idiot, before you end up like the rest of your loser countrymen, unable to accomplish simple tasks, ornery, confrontational, entitled to all hell. and before you "boomer" me, i suspect i'm maybe older than you by 5 years or so, i just had a great fortune to not be born in your country

>>15543 Not OP but can you give a hint on what field this is? I only hear horror stories from aspiring illustrators.

>>15544 interactive experiences, but we come from education direction, so we both have a product that sustains us through contract slumps and we also don't do marketing projects or anything like that. i don't think you can measure the industry by us because we're tiny, and atypical in many respects. individual offices, no nerf guns, none of that patronizing american millennial bullshit. we are us based, but we don't actually have any americans in the design team or dev teams, not to mention c-level. it's unintentional, i have four postings open right now, and i interview roughly 4-5 people a month, and consistently get people with the kind of attitude that the op exhibits. people with no work skill, no personal projects, mediocre portfolios, but ridiculous amount of attitude. worse, none of them are able or willing to learn from older or more experienced people. like, it's all, like, about self discovery, you know, it'll just come to me, you know? maybe, just maybe, the reason lots of american aspiring illustrators talk about their horror experiences is because no sane place would hire them, and there aren't that many sane places to begin with. and by sane i don't mean top names, which are usually sweat shops, but places that are small, focused and dedicated. i believe most companies have adjusted to the specifics of talent pool by basically treating their employees as disposable units. a kind of reduced form of infinite monkeys. man that came out very mean. i'm not saying that average american illustrator is a spoiled child, or that all american companies that hire illustrators are sweatshops. it's just that there's two independent tendencies that feed each other.

>>15552 >I don't think you can measure the industry by us because we're tiny, and atypical in many respects. That makes sense. The horror stories came from good people who got the sweatshop treatment, so the scenario is probably different.

>>15543 >>15552 OP here, you're making a ton of assumptions about me that aren't true, most of which have no basis in anything. I don't care that I have to make a process notebook in general. I've made them before and they've been really easy: I just compiled all my sketches and reference images into a PDF file and sent it off to the teacher along with the finished work. It's not hard in any sense of the word, and I can usually get it done in half an hour or less. My issue is not that I have to make a project notebook, it's that he wants them to be needlessly detailed and contain content that has nothing to do with my actual work. I shouldn't have to include examples of other people's solutions to the problem, nor should I need to create a written summary of the assignment. Images and text boxes saying what they are should be enough, and indeed have been enough for every other teacher, most of whom were also around his age.

>>15556 >Images and text boxes saying what they are should be enough, and indeed have been enough for every other teacher, most of whom were also around his age. Maybe there's a specific reason for it, I say just do it and see what he makes of it. You can't say if a teacher's method is bad until you've tried doing what he says.

>>15528 > If you're an illustrator or know an illustrator, can you please tell me if these are actually a thing? >>15556 > I've made them before and they've been really easy come now, child > My issue ... needlessly detailed ... I shouldn't have to ... nor should I guy honestly sounds like the only good teacher in your school. i'm out of this thread, just makes me angry. good luck in that job market, i'm sure changing requirements and constant churn of a sweatshop is not going to be a shock at all.

>>15556 If you already know what you need to do why are your parents wasting money sending you to school? Just do what your teacher asks you. That's what school is really about anyway, proving that you can take instruction and follow through with completing projects. You're getting a pretty worthless degree anyway, should of gone to trade school.

>>15562 OP here. My posts in this thread have been phrased really poorly so far, mostly because I wrote all of them at parts of the day when I was crunched for time. As such, they don't really properly communicate my point, and in my opinion paint an inaccurate picture of me as a person. >>15556 is particularly bad, being an an emotionally driven response, which is something that I try as hard as I can to avoid posting. Because of this, I'm going to try my best to reexplain myself more accurately. There’s a very good chance that I’ll botch it again because I'm awful at verbal communication, but hopefully this conveys my point at least a little bit better than my earlier posts. First things first, I've been making process notebooks all throughout college. They’re nothing new to me. I just hadn’t questioned them up until this professor stated his, in my opinion, absurd requirements for a process notebook (more on that later). Wondering why a process notebook would need to be so long, I went on duckduckgo (fuarrrk google), looked up every possible variation of “process notebook illustration” and couldn't really find anything that answered my question, which lead to me starting this thread. But I digress. The first time I made a process notebook was in a digital apps class where we primarily focused on adobe illustrator. The teacher told us to put notes, sketches, and earlier versions of the final product on to different pages separated by category, and then to add annotations to each page explaining what everything was. These were then saved as pdf files which were submitted along with the project, with a page count that floated between the high single and the low double digest, depending on how involved the project was (although I could easily imagine that number getting much higher when I actually get an illustration job and work on long-term projects) This seems perfectly reasonable to me. The process notebook gives insight into the decision making process and serves to preserve good but unfitting ideas for use in later projects, and takes so little time in comparison to the rest of the project that the pros easily outweigh the cons. What I don't understand, however is what this teacher wants us to do. He wants our process notebooks to include literal essays describing in detail what the problem was, what we thought of the assignment, how our cultural background effected our decision making process, every website we visited while researching, multiple definitions of the type of problem being solved, a summary of our solution to the problem, three examples of other people's solutions to the problem, and then finally all of the stuff I would include in what I consider to be a “standard project notebook”. They also need to be done on physical paper, with each page being inserted into a plastic sleeve which is then itself inserted into a three ring binder. It just seems, to me at least, like busywork. If there is a practical reason for this way of doing things, please, by all means, explain it to me. I really mean it. I'm not an unreasonable guy, and I by no means consider myself an expert in anything (besides maybe jerking off, which I excel at). If I get an explanation for something that makes sense, I'm usually satisfied enough to stop being bothered by it, and in many cases I'll outright change my mind on the matter. But I need to have some sort of explanation, or I'll just continue being confused and frustrated. P.S. I said “boomer” in the OP because I think it's a funny word and I didn't want people to take my thread too seriously, which obviously backfired horribly. I respect everyone who acts in a respectable manner, regardless of age, and I think that the people who actually seriously mock the older generations are unsympathetic morons.

>>15528 >Because it feels like one of those things that college teachers think are very important but in reality aren't even really done in the industry. So true. It's not limited to creative-type educational paths either. I'm an accounting grad and I can't count the number of net present value/net future value calculations I had to do as exercises in class. I'm 8 years out of school, almost all that time in various real-world accounting roles (I've had a very jack-of-all-trades career so far) and I can count on one hand the number of times I've had to figure out NPV/NFV. Maybe the M&A or loan-officer crowd uses it more often, I don't know. But the former are scumbags and the latter are morons. I avoid public companies and financial institutions like the plague. Give me a many-hats role in a small private company anyday. It feels way more fulfilling to help small businesses stay organized and grow, than be a goddamn cog in some bigger workplace, dealing with territorial office politics crap.

>>15613 You can see this when older, famous artists make an instruction video of their process and use real paint, submit a few blobby sketches to the client so he chooses what they like the best (or they choose themselves without asking), then they make slow and careful studies by hand and finally work in peace and solitude on the final illustration and everything goes smooth. As if the client wants to see your sketchy blobs before your start to work and won't ask you to change the finished thing 10 times or redo it from scratch before tomorrow. Some are so out of touch to say it's not true that you have to use digital, when you're competing with thousands of younger people who didn't waste too much time learning "the hard way" and went straight to the digital tools to skip all the hard parts, and get the same results in 1/10 of the time. And if their client tells them to repaint it all before tomorrow they can do it. All under the assumption that if you work really hard and want it very much, you can make the art you want the way you want, which is simply not true when you're joining a studio. Manga is (not for long) an industry that wants people to submit work and produce things, and the attitude is almost the opposite. They acknowledge that only individuals with exceptional talent and stamina can handle the job, that the industry is ruthless and you'll be removed at the first difficulty, editors will trash your work, crunch time is all the time and you'll have to cut every corner you can. All these aspects are completely transparent, often unpleasantly so because they're actually preparing people for jobs and they need to cut the chaff. I'm no Japanese mangaka but the more I think about this the more the Western art industry feels like glorified edu-tainment with no real intention of preparing anybody. A couple reputable people who had nothing to gain confirmed to me that a greater and greater slice of artists' income comes from teaching art while there's less and less money for younger artists. I don't think there's any evil intent from anybody but it's a bit like how older generations talk to the new ones about work and success. They just don't understand how fast things are changing, how crowded everything is, and how you can't use the old method to achieve the same things. I think art made the traditional way will go the way of mass-produced objects still made by hand. A handful people will get by selling a beautifully imperfect handmade item as a luxury good while the average factory makes 100 items per minute with more or less the same specs at a fraction of the price. Soon enough these skills will matter as much as knowing how mix clay and make pottery by hand when you start your job at a factory that makes pots and operate the pot-making machine's computer.

>>15628 >A couple reputable people who had nothing to gain confirmed to me that a greater and greater slice of artists' income comes from teaching art while there's less and less money for younger artists. I think this is just a return to normalcy. For literally thousands of years intellectuals who hadn't inherited family fortunes were usually making their living from teaching. Even Aristotle paid the bills by being the personal tutor of Alexander the Great. There's a reason I studied accounting and do it as a day job, and keep my photography strictly as a hobby.

>>15633 >were usually making their living from teaching Sorry but no. Artists took apprentices to have assistants while they were working, and the assistant got skills in return. Those skills would eventually give them work. Apprenticeship was just a bridge between two generations at work. Same thing with fathers and sons. There is nothing like this today, the teaching is empty, it results into nothing. You are taught skills so one day you'll be able to teach, and this weird performative teaching act is replacing the actual job of an artist.

>>15634 What's this job?

>>15634 You're confounding tradesmen & artists/intellectuals. Already the two usually belonged to two different social classses, which makes a difference.