Lorena Spurio’s opening illustration for Vox’s parental leave story demonstrates how three fundamental composition techniques can carry a concept

The frame your eye landed on first wasn’t an accident. Lorena Spurio’s opening illustration for Vox’s recent piece on parental leave uses three basic compositional tools, contrast, scale and cropping, to guide your attention to a single point. The way she layers them follows the same sequence that vision science says your brain does.

A look at how one illustrator turned a full section of literary criticism into a cohesive visual experience

Readers of Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung opened the newspaper’s celebrated Literatur supplement and found themselves surrounded by color. Across a full special section timed to the Leipzig Book Fair, twenty illustrations by Julia Kluge accompanied reviews of the season’s most anticipated titles. One artist threading an entire literary season together through her visual language.

Four illustrations for MIT Technology Review’s feature on the US-China Mars race show what happens when an illustrator lets the visual language carry conceptual weight.

Commissioned to illustrate a feature on NASA’s defunded Mars Sample Return program and China’s advancing Tianwen-3 mission, Shanghai-born, US-based illustrator Xinmei Liu chose to render the entire series in the visual grammar of mid-century Chinese state propaganda.

James Clapham packs a new dimension into his work for New Internationalist

James Clapham fills rooms. Bars, city blocks, entire neighborhoods. He packs them with interest until every square centimeter is pulling narrative duty. His compositions for The New Yorker, Bloomberg Businessweek, and The Washington Post are visual stockpiles where you keep finding new jokes. The tradition comes from Bruegel’s peasant panoramas, or even Richard Scarry’s Busytown. But Clapham’s flat digital color and comedic sensibility makes his work entirely contemporary.

Inside Carmen Casado’s illustrated takeover of the Guardian’s “How To Start” column

The fashion items scattered across the composition read like a thrift store haul from 1987. It’s the kind of image that makes you want to rummage through it. Casado has been illustrating this column since January 2025.