Calvin Sprague’s Second Sight for Harvard Business Review

Calvin Sprague created this illustration for Harvard Business Review’s “Gen AI Won’t Make Your Employees Experts,” an article about a Stanford and Harvard Business School study that found AI tools helped non-experts improve at conceptualizing ideas but hit a wall when it came to execution, where domain expertise proved irreplaceable. The researchers called it “the AI wall.”

Sprague’s goggles literalize the finding. They sit on top of the figure’s own glasses — the person’s existing knowledge and perspective. The AI instrument enhances what’s already there. Without that foundation underneath, the goggles have nothing to correct.

It’s an image about seeing, about the tools we use to see, and about what remains stubbornly invisible even with the best lenses technology can offer.

His illustrations are built from flat, color-blocked shapes outlined in thin black lines, giving figures and environments the crisp, interlocking quality of stained glass. He cites Milton Glaser, Saul Bass, and Heinz Edelmann as primary influences — a lineage that runs from midcentury graphic economy through the psychedelic whimsy of Yellow Submarine. The result is work that’s simple enough to read at a glance and stylized enough to function as metaphor.

An American illustrator and designer based in the Netherlands, Sprague is represented by Closer&Closer and Sensoart. His clients include The New York Times, Wired, The Atlantic, Fast Company, Apple, IBM, and Disney.