Ideation Services

What Bill Russell Can Do for You: Illustrator and visual journalist, Bill Russell offers a new approach to visual journalism in the current culture. He calls it ‘sketchbook journalism’. Everyone has a story to tell. Bill helps facilitate that with pictures and illustrated text.

Bill will tell the story of the people in your company, event or ideation session. Let it promote your business, acknowledge your people, visualize your products, showcase your technology and capture the moment.

For your event, Bill will go on location to interview, photograph and draw people in their environment. This new participatory style of art is available for corporate, advertising and lifestyle projects. These drawings can become part of your marketing, such as print or web banner ads, transit ads, collateral material, trade show displays, annual reports, in-house publications, Employee of the Month awards, etc.

For your meeting or conference ideation session, Bill listens, observes and creates drawings in a sketchbook, loose large format sheet or on a white board to visually capture the concepts, problems and solutions introduced by the participants. He can also create in situ portraits of these participants. The client receives any drawings produced and, if requested, as clean, color illustrations delivered as digital files for client use, within one workday.

See Bill’s work at RussellReportage.com then call or email Bill for a free project and fee consultation at 415.491.9734. Samples, comp materials and portfolio booklets are available on request.

His Experience: Bill completed a 4-month artist-in-residence at Recology San Francisco (formerly the San Francisco Dump), where he interviewed and drew the portraits of over 30 employees, from the maintenance man to the CEO about the work they do and the passion they put into their work. He created a book, a video and a set of prints.

Todo was a local ad-based magazine distributed free in taxicabs. Russell drew a portrait of a different cab driver every month for two years for an editorial feature called Drawn and Dispatched. This successful feature was an inventive approach to the reportage of some unique individuals.

As a staff artist at the San Francisco Chronicle, Bill created a weekly column in Saturday’s Datebook section called the Bay Folk Sketchbook. It featured a drawing and dialogue depicting interesting Bay area people. It was an unbiased look at over 80 local, diverse people at work and at play. In other sections of the paper, Bill brought his form of visual journalism. For the Op-ed section, he reported on social and political issues like the same-sex marriages at the San Francisco City Hall and his own process of becoming an American citizen. For the Wine section, he went on site to cover how workers at the Seghesio Winery in Dry Creek, California bring in the grape harvest.

Bill is currently working on an book about Civil War Reenactors.

The Costs: Project fees vary according to your needs and usage of materials created. Fees for ideation and drawings created a day rate based on your company’s net pay schedule. A typical ideation day averages an 8-hour day onsite and 3 hours offsite.

About Bill: Bill Russell has been an illustrator, designer, teacher and painter for over thirty years. He earned his BFA from Parsons School of Design in New York in 1976. From 1993 to 2000, Bill taught illustration students at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. From 1999 to 2005, he was a staff artist at the San Francisco Chronicle. His scratchboard illustrations can be seen at Billustration.com. His illustration agent is Reactor Art and Design.