The Anti-Social Century

Fictional cover illustration for The Atlantic.

I made this illustration as part of the Inkygoodness Illustration Bootcamp course. The brief was to create a cover illustration for The Atlantic, guided by one of their art directors Lizzie Hart. The illustration needed to capture the mood of the feature article “The Anti-Social Society”, which in short poses that our society is being designed to spend more and more time alone, at home.

I decided to focus on the rug as a symbol of coziness and the home, as well as a replacement for the road of our commute — with the rise of the working-from-home culture, you could theoretically spend all your days inside, moving from one corner of the house to the next. In this scenario, going to the grocery store is also replaced by simply ordering food. And of course, our lives are dominated by screen-time, which I wanted to emphasize with a contrasting color. With the empty line drawings, I wanted to hint at having kind of a shell of a life when all of it is spent alone.

Please note that this illustration was not published in the magazine, it was a fictional brief set as part of an illustration course.