An Answer For Everything: Christian Tate’s favourite illustrations

Our art director Christian Tate (above) designed and illustrated An Answer For Everything in its entirety. Ahead of its publication tomorrow he chooses his six favourite sets of illustrations from the book.

“This is Trischa Zorn, the world’s greatest Paralympian, from the infographic entitled ‘Who’s the greatest Paralympian of all time?’ I’d never heard of her before, and there aren’t many images of her online so it was tricky to get a good likeness. I hope I’ve done this amazing athlete justice. I’m also pretty pleased with my Pelé, from ‘Who’s the greatest footballer of all time?'”

“Here’s Bocourt’s terrific skink and Wallace’s giant bee from ‘Are extinct animals just hiding from us?’. These are exactly the kinds of illustration I thought I couldn’t do. I put off doing them for so long and I think they were some of my last bits for the book – hopefully they live up to their brilliant names.”

“Here’s Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan from ‘Who’s the best James Bond?’ Very happy to illustrate Dalton, the first 007 that I saw at the cinema and still my favourite – I think I got him spot-on, but actually surprised myself with how good Brosnan turned out, too.”

“Here’s a moon buggy from ‘What have we left on the moon?’ It’s easy to get carried away illustrating something you love – this moon buggy is drawn in way too much detail to see at this size on the page, but I loved doing it. The space shuttles in ‘How many people have been to space?’ are also really detailed.”

“For ‘What makes a memorable speech?’ I illustrated US vice-president Kamala Harris. While it’s great to create highly detailed drawings there’s no better feeling than cracking someone’s look in the simplest way possible. See also the pop stars from ‘Who’s the biggest musical act of all time?'”

“And finally, from ‘How much damage can a hurricane do?’, the Saffir-Simpson scale. As a child I loved the section at the front of an atlas full of charts and graphics – this, I guess, is my recreation of my earliest infographic memory. See also: world monuments and London buses as a unit of scale.”

This infographic is taken from An Answer For Everything, to be published by Bloomsbury on 28th October. Head here to pre-order the book and here to find out more about Delayed Gratification.

Posted on Wednesday, October 27th, 2021 - Categories: An Answer For Everything.