Illustrate This

Not long ago, one talented British illustrator told me that illustration was in such a parlous state it would have to die before it could be reborn. It was a gloomy prediction, made in the teeth of what we found ourselves agreeing was a 'crisis', but at least it offered some hope of a future resurrection. It now seems, though no one is shouting it from the rooftops just yet, that some kind of revival might really be under way.

Pick up your Sunday colour supplement - there's a hand-drawn Shakespearean Soul brother toting a ghettoblaster on the front. Turn on the TV - come the ad break, a pack of groovy NatWest cashcard users struts around with black and white cartoon body parts. Drop by Tower Records to check out the latest from Mercury Award winners Gomez - like their other CDs, it's decorated with a tasteful illustration that appears to be executed in, yes, soft-focus brush strokes.

Illustration has been in the doldrums for most of the 90s, so it's saying something to report that insiders are beginning to think they have a trend worth talking up. Last year, Rob Mason, a leading figure in the 70s generation of self-styled 'radical illustrators', who teaches at Norwich School of Art and Design, initiated a detailed research paper on the state of the discipline. (This is a departure in itself: illustration is woefully under-researched.) Mason began his investigations a worried man but concluded his year-long quest convinced that illustration is coming back. Darrel Rees of the illustration agency Heart, founded in the lean years of the mid-90s, dates the first flicker of this mood-swing to late 1997. Design studios that had shown little inclination even to cast an eye over illustrators' portfolios were suddenly starting to call. 'They really wanted hand-made marks', he says.

Illustration's recent problems can be summarised in a single word: technology. Until the coming of the Apple Macintosh, designers and art directors were as likely to turn to an illustrator as a photographer when they needed a picture. The 80s were boom years for the applied image-maker, if not always the viewer. By the end, you couldn't walk into a bank without being greeted by a paper landslide of visual fluff and it was obviously time for a clean-out. The Mac gave designers much greater control over all aspects of design and production. Photoshop meant they could construct, manipulate and merge imagery of their own to achieve a vastly more complex and - to the unjaded eye - exciting fusion of type and image.

The modish new design aesthetic was computer-driven, hard-edged, glossy and clinical, with montage using digital photography the inevitable compositional method. Anyone with a computer could do it (after a fashion) and the hand-crafted picture now looked impossibly folksy and twee. Besides, this messy, hand-made stuff was just too awkward to handle. In the early 80s, it would have been deemed a laudable act of innovation to present an art director with an illustration hewn from, say, lumps of coal. A decade later, illustrators were lectured for failing to embrace the computer and make the art buyer's life easy with spotless, weightless digital files.

What we are seeing now, illustration's champions suggest, is the perhaps inevitable swing of the pendulum back in the other direction. The keyboard-generated look has become predictable and trite. Blurry colour photos of semi-abstract details no longer thrill. 'It's frighteningly simple, the whole business', says Simon Pemberton, a founding member of the London illustration collective, Monster. 'People just get bored'. And boring the audience is the last thing that publishers, design companies, ad agencies and their clients in the communications business can afford. Even routine projects that cannot, in the long view, be said to break new ground (see any of the examples above) look unexpected, original and fresh. At the same time, working practices are changing for good. It's only now, suggests Mason, that some of the finest illustrators are discovering how to reconcile the computer with their established styles and themes. Pemberton, for instance, has given up working with Polaroid emulsion on canvas for a painterly use of Photoshop, while 13 of the 26 artists represented by Heart have gone digital to some degree.

If illustration is coming back, it has plenty of lost ground to make up. The collapse of interest in the medium, the feeling that it was no longer central to communication design, let alone in the vanguard, has helped to create a generation of art directors (with honorable exceptions) whose commissioning skills are rudimentary at best. Illustrators complain that briefs are either non-existent, leaving the image-maker to guess what is required, only to discover when the work is done that it was something completely different, or absurdly prescriptive, treating the image-maker as a mindless 'pair of hands'. Collaboration is the essence of an applied art, but design education still largely fails to find ways of teaching designers and illustrators to co-operate. The schism already exists before they start work.

Mason argues that one of the ways forward is for illustrators to take a much more assertive, authorial and even entrepreneurial view. This is common in the US, where image-makers such as Marshall Arisman, Henrik Drescher, Sue Coe, Chris Ware, Maira Kalman and Jonathon Rosen use adult comic books, graphic novels, children's books, exhibitions and self-initiated visual essays to pursue their personal obsessions, without commercial dilution or compromise. Here, too, there is just enough starting to happen in Britain to suggest a revival. Sara Fanelli, an Italian artist based in London, has created an oneiric collage-world in children's books such as It's Dreamtime (1999). Adult fiction publishers also seem prepared to take occasional risks with image-led narratives, such as Raymond Briggs' realist memoir Ethel & Ernest (Jonathan Cape, 1999), and Graham Rawle's playful murder mystery, Diary of an Amateur Photographer (Picador, 1998). Even Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four was reissued earlier this year, on its 50th anniversary, with minatory images by RCA graduate Alex Williamson.

It has to be said, though, that in terms of visual, conceptual and disciplinary ambition even projects like these fall some way short of the standard set by the earlier, pre-computer, largely RCA-based generation of British illustrators, of which Mason was a member. As a statement of what a rigorously expanded form of illustration might achieve, Russell Mills' late-70s mixed-media interpretations of songs by Brian Eno (published in 1986 as More Dark Than Shark) have rarely been equalled. Mills himself was hugely influential on younger illustrators - Pemberton, for one, cites him immediately - and much imitated as a result, but as Mason points out, what most followers took from him was less his concern with research and content than his use of abstraction and gestural and textural effects.

Many of the illustrators on Heart's books produce work that is highly accomplished, but there is a brightness of palette, a lightness of mood, a graphic clarity combined with a lack of substantive content that renders much of the work merely decorative. The holy grail for many illustrators operating at this level is a high-profile ad campaign, or an annual report. Is it really possible to reconcile such commissions with the engaged critical perspectives that have historically been achievable in, for instance, progressive editorial work, or (outside Britain) the theatre poster? Most of these illustrations don't really 'illustrate' anything at all. They don't actively engage the viewer - this would require the artist to take a position - so much as bathe their settings in a feel-good aura that led Mason to coin the term 'ambient illustration'. What representational content they do contain is a red herring. It doesn't need to be there and in all probability the viewer doesn't really look at it. In that sense, these images exist precisely to efface themselves.

Perhaps a general ambivalence about pictures is to blame. 'If people are making illustrations about serious things', says Mason, 'then you tend to be talking about "pictures", and I think people have got very suspicious about "pictures" and have come to deem them very uncool and very uncontemporary. If you make an image that is about something, you're making a statement, you're nailing your colours to the mast. There's a terrible cautiousness in people these days about doing that. They're scared of looking silly.'

Hence, no doubt, the popularity of the outline drawing: the illustration that's only half there. You see it in the work of street-conscious design teams; in Sleazenation and Arena; in fashion ads; in the Habitat catalogue; in compilations of Techno CD art; in the NatWest commercial about escaping from your job and starting a business. It looks a lot like technical drawing, or slightly retro clip art from an old 70s Letraset sheet, or airline safety information graphics, and it's naturally a doddle to do it on the Mac. Even in its rougher-edged, more obviously hand-drawn forms it looks cool, not too bothered, anonymous, ironic. If we are remaking illustration, so far it's very much in our own image.