Given that most of my friends are techies, it didn't take long before I was doing illustrations for tech books and magazines. This is one of a series I did for a friend in the Boston area who was publishing a comprehensive guide to using the Internet. It was 1993 and the Net had only just escaped the confines of the military, or academic science. The World Wide Web (Golly, PICTURES through this Internet thing!) had just been invented. One of the concepts in the book which needed an illustration was the coming universality of the Net where everyone anywhere on earth could potentially communicate, or buy from, or play games with, anyone else on earth.
I did a somewhat representative group of people, though there weren't any homeless guys checking in at their local library. From upper left clockwise: A Little Old Lady with her cat, checking a newsgroup for antique sales. The cat, official animal of the Internet. A gamer with wireless headphones. A guy from Pakistan, with a a mosque in the back. A Black guy with a nametag, possibly an African or Caribbean official. A financial trader gal with big shoulder business suit. A Deadhead in a tie dye ordering tickets for the next concert online. (The Grateful Dead were one of the first bands to offer this option.)A political speechwriter or policy writer. And a college student in Japan. Note the stylized "cloud" around the group. This "cloud" concept has been around for a surprisingly long time.
Ink on illustration board, 8" x 10", May 1993. Published in "The Internet Guide for New Users," by Daniel Dern, McGraw-Hill 1993.
1 comment:
We were beyond the "organize your recipes" point by that time. Email was the big thing. My mom leapt on it like a frog on June bug. I'd been on email of one kind or another on and off since 1977 or thereabouts. The times in between--well, you know what it's like when your computer's broke and you're offline.
Post a Comment