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Mirko Ilic: Fist to Face by Dejan Kršić
320 pages, softcover, $45.00, published by Print, an imprint of F&W Publications
www.mydesignshop.com/mirko-llic

When Milton Glaser writes the preface to a book, and the introduction is by Steven Heller, you may well imagine that the work inside will be exemplary. And it is. Fist to Face documents the career of Mirko Ilić, an iconoclastic designer from the former Yugoslavia, who has produced a wide range of often-controversial work from political illustrations to such disparate clients as Rage Against the Machine and the film You’ve Got Mail. Along the way he rocked the establishment as an art director at the New York Times and Time magazine. His illustrations are often visceral in nature, and always pointed in their humor and their take on the cultural zeitgeist. Back home he could well be called “King Mirko” says Steven Heller. The man is dynamic, acerbic and funny, and immensely talented. He is also a generous mentor who lives and breathes art and design. Whether he is creating a transgender Barbie to illustrate an article on sexual reassignment surgery or painfully illustrating the wages of war in his homeland of Croatia, by showing a fierce dog in a helmet with a piece of meat that is a map, Ilić’s confrontational designs demand your attention. Fans will love this collection that features 500 full-color images in one volume and will learn a great deal about his career, and about international design in Dejan Kršić’s informative and well-written text. If you don’t know Ilić’s work, you should. This book would be required reading if I taught design.

www.theillustrationconference.org — Portland, Oregon has been announced as the host city of ICON8 The Illustration Conference. Mark the dates July 9-12, 2014 in your calendar. “The board of directors of ICON8 are already hard at work crafting a program to match the beauty and adventurous spirit of the Pacific Northwest,” claims the email I received. I can’t wait to see if the board tackles the theme song from “Portlandia”!

www.appo.org/my/isabelle-dervaux— Isabelle Dervaux is a veteran illustrator who has branched out to work with other creative people to help them fine tune group presentations, do self-promotion, and prepare creative slideshows, that she terms “visual biographies”—still image sequences that tell a unique story. Check her site to see examples and read about the services she offers.

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Keeping Clients Coming Back
By Maria Piscopo
www.mpiscopo.com and www.eyeist.com

Once you have a chance at a job with a new client or a big job for a current client, there is a tendency to rush through the standard business practices. Don’t do it, especially with new clients. Illustrators often feel if they are “easy” on the client on the first job, the client will decide to stay and give them more work. Not necessarily true; all it does is set you up for an unhealthy relationship. The way to build healthy and profitable relationships with clients and turn jobs into repeat business is to use good business practices dealing with client projects. Here are some client project issues that will come up with your illustration jobs, and some tips on how to deal with them to develop and maintain a strong relationship thus encouraging clients to keep coming back with more work.

The Deadline
This is a very delicate subject in any job with any client. Many illustrators feel if they meet a miraculous and unreasonable deadline, the client will “love them”. Unfortunately, all that will do is ensure the client will always give you jobs with not enough time to get them done properly in the future! Every client has a deadline horror story to tell that makes them wary of giving accurate information on this point. The best bet is to ask the kind of questions designed to help the client feel more comfortable with your ability to meet their deadlines. Instead of asking, "When do you want this job done?" as this is much too subjective a question, ask for more objective and measurable information such as, "When will the website with these illustrations launch?” Look behind the stated deadline. By breaking the delivery into a series of benchmarks on a timeline, both you and your client will feel more in control of the process (and they will feel safer coming back for more).