Project 3: Editorial Illustration - MEJO482

Project Overview

Download a PDF of the creative brief for Project 3.

You are an editorial illustrator for a news magazine and you’ve just been assigned to illustrate the artwork for an exclusive, ground-breaking story for the center spread of next month’s edition. The team of journalists working on the piece is still writing, so you won’t get to read the story. But you do have access to the pitch that the team used to get approval to work on the story. You will need to read through it and pick out concepts and ideas that will form the basis for your illustration.

Look at the three links below to see some examples of great editorial illustrations:

The Story Pitches

We are approaching the two-year anniversary of the invasion of Ukraine by Russia with no end in sight.

Russia continues to defend what little gains it made in 2022 while U.S. military aid to Ukraine is has stopped flowing due to political gridlock in Congress.

Over 400 million tons of plastic are produced every year for use in a wide variety of applications.
At least 14 million tons of plastic end up in the ocean every year, and plastic makes up 80% of all marine debris found from surface waters to deep-sea sediments.
Marine species ingest or are entangled by plastic debris, which causes severe injuries and death.
Plastic pollution threatens food safety and quality, human health, coastal tourism, and contributes to climate change.

With the advent of so-called “Artificial Intelligence” there has been a massive increase in it popularity as a tool for creators.

But many questions remain surrounding the legal issues regarding these AI algorithms. For example, the algorithms have to be trained on billions of images of other artists’ and creators’ work in order to do what they do. Many artists are furious at the idea that their work is being “stolen” by AI tools like Midjourney, DALL-E and Stable Diffusion.

In fact, Getty Images has filed a lawsuit in the UK against a company it claims scraped its photo database to produce images.

Now that Apple has released its highly-anticipated Vision Pro virtual reality headset, researchers are already wondering how the technology will be used to enhance learning experiences both inside and outside the classroom.

While parents and teachers are wary of putting yet another screen in front of their childrens’ faces, many are excited and curious to see how the devices could help children learn.