— Mar 31, 03:49 PM — Comments

An Illustrated World

As a design director at Microsoft in the early ‘90s, Martin French had it made. “You leave art school dreaming that you get this kind of position,” he says. “It had everything.” But for French, something was missing.

“I was always thinking of doing illustration full time. It never went away,” he says. He repeatedly tried to bury the thoughts, but in 1996, eight years after starting at Microsoft and nearly twelve years after graduating from Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design, he realized he was going to have to trust his instincts. “Whatever it came from, there was that deep-set feeling that I can do this, I can do it at a high level, and if I don’t try, I’m never going to sleep at night.”

It was a fortuitous decision for French. His work, for clients such as ESPN, the Village Voice, the Atlantic Monthly, and the Discovery Channel, is characterized by its focus on the human figure. An almost palpable energy radiates from
the page as his characters leap, sing, breakdance, and drum against a background of abstract textures and patterns. Most recently, French was featured in two international publications, extending his influence world-wide via Brazil’s online Revista Ilustrar, and China’s Idea-Illustration.

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