2006 Adobe Design Achievement Awards

Digital Illustration: Finalist

Adam David Simpson

Royal College of Art

The Best of All Possible Worlds

Biography: Adam David Simpson graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 2004 with a First Class Honors degree in Illustration. He then moved to the Royal College of Art, London, to pursue a master's degree in Communication Art and Design. He has exhibited in London, Edinburgh, Bologna, and numerous Japanese art museums, and has undertaken a placement at Rhode Island School of Design in the U.S. Adam combines hand-drawn and digital processes to articulate his sense of place and to make statements about human nature. He aims to be inventive, versatile, epic, provocative, and to bridge the illustration and design worlds.

Objective: This piece of work was inspired by Voltaire's satirical novel "Candide" (published in 1759). In the book, he attacks the philosophy of optimism dominant within religious institutions of his time, specifically the idea that we live in the best of all possible worlds and that apparent misfortune, misery, and conflict are actually all part of a greater good we cannot perceive. The aim of this piece was to bring Voltaire's satire into a contemporary setting to suggest how the irrational philosophy of optimism is prevalent today.

Tools used: For this project, I used a combination of Adobe® Illustrator® and Photoshop®. I essentially built the structure of the image in Illustrator and then added the textures, shading, and small hand-drawn elements in Photoshop. The surface of the buildings was created by scanning textured paper into Photoshop and then adjusting the brightness and color balance.

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