From the Freelance Files

Clicky to embiggen…

Every once and awhile I pull out some artwork from an old job that might be interesting to share. These two full page illustrations were for InfoWorld magazine circa 2005. The story was about Bill Gate‘s “plan” for the future of computing. The concept was that Gates was supposed to be not just predicting where computing was going, but was supposed to be one of the chief architects of that future. We decided on making him the coach of a football team. I personally wanted to make the players into robots with computer screens for faces, etc. because it seemed to make more sense that Gates would be directing the computer world, not a bunch of big football players, but that got shot down.

This job was significant not for the job itself, but for the irony of it. I believe one of the things Gates mentioned in that article (can’t find any tear sheets of it today), was that things like magazines would eventually become computerized. About two years later InfoWorld ceased their print editions and went to an online only model. Computer magazines were one of the niche markets that got hit the hardest in the rise of Internet media consumption. That makes sense, since their target market was exactly the type of readers who would trade paper for pixels early and often. This might be the last job I ever did for a computing magazine, and I used to do work for a couple of different ones.

The image above was the cover. This was a full page interior illustration:

Clicky to embiggen…