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THE FEATURED IMAGE
 

 

Welcome to the twentieth issue of The Featured Image newsletter, a place where writing meets art. As a reminder, the goal here is to add visual creativity to our work and gain inspiration from those already doing it.
Creator Highlight: Carl Richards
Talk vs Do by Carl Richards
Carl Richards is a financial planner who sketches dead simple images to help make a point (and now has 42k Twitter followers because of it). His work appears in the Sketch Guy column in The New York Times and in his newsletter, Behavior Gap

You can't get any more simple than his process. A big black sharpie on a big white piece of paper. 
Focus by Carl Richards
The images themselves are all self-explanatory, but in his newsletter and his website there are little essays that expand on the ideas. 

Like this essay on creativity

I love that Richards has found success using such simple visuals. If you are trying to communicate an idea or are writing something, you don't need an accompanying visual to be a work of art. It can literally be a venn diagram. 

Successful visual communication is biased towards overall creativity in how to express an idea rather pure artistic talent. Someone who has never picked up a drawing tool can easily create something more interesting than a technically accomplished artist who doesn't have anything to say. 

On Richards' website, there is short three minute video talking about how he got to where he is now (It frankly has pretty spectacular production values, kudos to whoever made it). 

Here are four quotes that really stood out to me:

“This all started out of a purely pragmatic need to communicate an idea to someone who wasn’t understanding it.”

“It’s purpose art. It’s there to communicate an idea, get the job done.”

“What people don’t know is that there were six, seven years of putting this stuff up online to crickets. I thought my mom and my sister were the only ones going to my website.”

“The people who get it, get it, and the people who don’t, don’t. And I’m cool with that.”

So whatever your thing is in life, you can probably stand out by using simple sketches to go along with it. Even if only your Mom and sister check it out for seven years, it will feel good.
I've discovered this writer Tom Froese. He's an illustrator who shares all sorts of insight and draws his own images for everything he writes. A simple way to save the internet from boring sameness is if more writers had images like his!

How people think digital art is made. Less than a minute. Pretty funny. 
Ok, that's it for this week. Be sure to create something cool and share it with someone.

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Erik 
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