Illustration, Graphic Designer, God of the Finer Details… what does it all mean? Zoe Sadokierski, book illustrator, t-shirt entrepreneur and soon on her way to becoming Dr Sadokierski when she completes her PHD talks Savvy Style through modern life from a design perspective.

Who are you and where did you come from?

Zoe Sadokierski, from Sydney via Leura, Alstonville and Jakarta.

Where are you and how did you come to be there?

The design café at UTS. I'm hungry and it's raining – it was the closest place to get food without getting wet (I had an altercation with my umbrella this morning).

What do you do for a crust?

Scrape together the crumbs from a lot of different sandwiches: Design and illustration (book covers, illustrations, t-shirts, logos, etc); writing (creative and academic); teaching (in the Visual Communications degree at UTS) and research (currently working on a PhD).

Do you eat crusts?

I eat almost anything.

What is the biggest misconception about the industry where your crusts fall?

That design is easy – it's just making pictures (or worse, design is using a computer to make pictures). An awful lot of thinking, compromise and mediation happen behind the scene. Making something beautiful is easy – making it appropriate to the client brief and communicate effectively to the intended audience is much more difficult.

What does the word image mean to you?

I'm writing a chapter of my PhD that deals with the fact that 'image' is virtually impossible to define because it means such different things to different people. So right now, defining 'image' makes me want to crawl under the table with a bottle of wine.

Tell me about your journey?

I started drawing when I could hold a crayon and never really stopped. I was one of the 'arty' kids at school (thankfully before Emo ruined it for everyone) and was generally expected to end up doing what I'm doing. I staged a half-hearted rebellion against that by studying PR/Advertising for a year, which I decided wasn't my bag after the lecture on "ethics". I switched to Visual Communications, where I discovered typography and graphic design. There was gloomy six months after uni where I found myself on the wrong side of a bar (behind it), until I landed a job as an in-house book designer at Allen & Unwin. I had a great time doing that for about three years, then got restless and left to start a research PhD fulltime. "Fulltime" is a flexible concept to me. In the two and a half years I've been working on my PhD, I also started a t-shirt business with my mate Ollie, got back into creative writing, developed some courses teaching writers to use design elements as literary devices, and produced a range of freelance designs and illustrations. It's a yum-cha approach to working, but I love it.

Tell me about your dream destination?

The dream changes constantly, but it always involves a hammock garden and a helper monkey called Ping Pong, whose main task is cocktail mixing.

What does your daily job entail?

It varies depending on which deadlines loom most ominously. At the moment, it's a lot of writing peppered with freelance work and teaching. I fight things off against each other too – if I hate what I'm writing I punish it by drawing something beautiful.

What projects inspire you?

Working with clever people. Working with people who love what they do is always inspiring. I'm collaborating with some writers at the moment, which is fantastic.

What is your take on your industry at the moment?

It's an exciting place to be. The general public is increasingly visually aware and appreciative of design.

What do you believe illustrators need to stay true to original thought?

I think good illustration should always challenge or add something new to the written text. If an illustration simply reproduces what the text says, it's redundant. Why say the same thing twice? A good illustration should clarify the writing – help the reader to understand what it means, like with diagrams and charts – or it should change the way the reader understands the writing. A great example of this is how different editions of Alice in Wonderland are illustrated. Some editions are sweet and whimsical, like the original Tenniel illustrations. Others are darker and critical, like Barry Mosers' edition with characters resembling political figures of the time (Humpty Dumpty looks like Nixon). The written text is exactly the same, but the illustrations change the way you interpret it because they add something totally new.

What do you do when you can't create?

Write lists. Read books. Watch bad crime dramas on TV. But generally if I'm feeling uninspired it means I'm taking things (myself) too seriously, so I go and play with my friends and family. Social time is incredibly important. Eating and drinking with other people is incredibly important – you have to be connected. I know it sounds like I work all the time, but there's lots of play in there too.

Who is your favourite illustrator?

Off the top of my head: I love Ralph Steadman's inky mayhem, Clemens Habicht's ephemeral collages, Aubrey Beardsley's elegant women with wayward morals, Edwina White's droll delights, Edward Gorey's melancholic narratives, James Hancock's quirky line work and David Shrigely's grubby little drawings.

Is what you do the same as Graphic Design?

To me, graphic design is just one part of it – the picture-making bit. The most difficult part of the design or illustration process is figuring out what your client wants from you – sometimes they don't actually know themselves. I often wish for a Visual Babel Fish to translate what people see in their head into a language I understand. (In Douglas Adam's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the characters slipped a Babel Fish into their ear and it translated any language to them). Once you've figured out what the client wants to say, you have to find the best way to communicate that to the audience. All this goes on well before any graphic designing begins. Graphic design what you produce. Visual Communications is the process of figuring out how to do that effectively.

You like book design and, you have designed quite a few. Tell us about that…

For me, book design is creative heaven – the union of word and image, in a perfect, self-contained form. A book is a magical thing – a whole world in paper that you can hold in your hands and claim as your own. I love getting to own a book for a little while before anyone else does.

A good book cover needs to do two things simultaneously – it needs to reflect the content of the book (what it is about) and it needs to position the book in context (what other books it is like).

Getting a cover 'right' – so that the author and the publisher and the marketing department are happy with it – is professionally satisfying. I get a kick out of seeing someone reading a book I designed, but it's also unsettling – you spend so much time looking at it in your space, seeing it out there in the world on its own is strange. 


Whose book cover would you love to do and why?

My own, so I could be a fantastically obnoxious author. I'd insist on having an awful drawing my child/partner/friend did of a bunny on the cover, even though my book has nothing to do with rabbits. I'd have my name gigantic, embossed in purple, hologram foil. On the back I'd have a photo of me, circa 1991, and demand it be retouched to the point that my mother doesn't recognise me. I'd request the background be orange, because someone I know who doesn't have anything to do with either publishing or marketing told me orange books sell more. Then, I'd wait ‘til just before it went to print and have my agent call the publisher to say I hate it and don't want it to be published anymore unless a new cover is designed to look just like The DaVinci Code, stat.

What projects have you got coming up?

I'm redesigning the covers for Lian Hearn's Otori series at the moment, which is a fabulous job. I'm also collaborating with a writer friend on a submission for an anthology, doing a logo for a copy-writing collective, and most exciting, planning a book with a long-time friend and collaborator – we're travelling from Beijing to St Petersburg on the trans-Mongolian rail in October, followed by a stint in Finland and Easter Europe. Oh, yeah, and the PhD.

What did you study to be who you are?

BA in Visual Communication at UTS.

What do you wish you never studied?

Chemistry. Though I did use the word 'nanotube' for a 74-point bingo in online Scrabble the other day.