59% of illustrators only work at their desk | Twine Survey

Today's Article is brought to you by Joe Scarffe from Twine

RIP the pencil and paper. Gone are the days of the sketchbook.

Twine surveyed over 1000 illustrators in the US and UK to find some interesting data about the modern illustrator’s work habits. We asked them about what hardware, software they use and
whether they work away from their desk.

We found some really interesting results.

Surprisingly, 59% only work from their desk. And only a mere fraction of those do any handdrawn work (obviously this is not including digital pencils). However, unsurprisingly, 86% use Adobe Creative Suite products and 83% have some form of Wacom hardware.

Gone are days of illustrators getting out their sketchbook to doodle ideas.

Does this mean we are losing serendipitous creativity in the illustration world? Possibly.

This is undoubtedly down to the dominance of Wacom and Adobe in the market. Nearly all illustrators use them both.

But there is are big changes happening in the industry.

24% of illustrators now use an iPad and that rises to 58% when you only look at illustrators who work away from their desk.

It’s clear that portable tablets are changing the industry and software like companies like Affinity and Procreate will accelerate this further.

Data

1164 illustrators surveyed. Sources: Illustrators from Twine (30%) and LinkedIn (70%) who are based in the US and UK.

About Twine

Twine is an online marketplace that helps companies hire quality creative freelancers to help grow their businesses.

The Twine marketplace has over 250,000 creative freelancers in illustration, design, animation, music and film. They handpick the best quality freelancers for each project, saving businesses
time and money, whilst ensuring a high quality result.

Twine have worked with companies all over the world from fortune 500 companies like Intuit to exciting start-ups like WeWork.

Stuart Logan (Twine’s CEO) says:

We’ve seen a big change in the way people work.
Companies are hiring more freelancers year on year and flexible working within companies is
commonplace. We were really surprised that more illustrators don’t work away from their desk
or studio.
But, this has to be down to technology. Previously essential software and hardware has
anchored illustrators but now, with the newer tablets, we are seeing a change.
I fully expect when we survey illustrators in 2019 there to even more that work away from their
desk. The benefits can be tremendous for a creativity within the industry. Where are you more
like to be creative, tied to your desk or anywhere in the world?

With Twine, illustrators and other creative freelancers can build a visual portfolio, collaborate with other like-minded creatives and find exciting new job opportunities.

Twine has been backed by a number of high profile UK based institutional investors and angel investors, including GMCA, AXM and Creative England.

About Stuart Logan

Stuart Logan, 33, Twine’s CEO and Co-Founder, is a technology entrepreneur and software developer. Founder of the ad-tech company Amnis Technology, and the global creative freelance platform, Twine, Stuart has a degree in Computer Science from the University of Manchester, building on a passion for the power of technology that began when he started coding as a 5-year-old.

Also a creative, Stuart fused his early love of music and tech by creating YouTorrent, a torrent meta search engine aggregating music and film sources which peaked with over 100,000 daily visitors.

This experience, along with his love of artistic collaboration, ultimately inspired the idea behind Twine, a platform for supporting and connecting all creative sectors worldwide.

Between 2011 and 2013, Stuart built Amnis Technology, a software company which grew into a business earning £1.4m annual revenue and supplying 6 million downloads of its Windows utility
products.

The experience in marketing and scaling a business gained from building Amnis, combined with its financial success, afforded Stuart the chance to found Twine.

As a passionate creative, Stuart saw the inability of creatives to easily collaborate and find work opportunities as the key issue in the creative industries worldwide.

In response to this, Twine was born in 2013.