Three Questions for Joshua Gorchov, Principal, The Loud Cloud Creative Agency

Three Questions for Joshua Gorchov, Principal, The Loud Cloud Creative Agency You have worked for years as an accomplished, award winning illustrator. Having worked with many Art Directors in your day, what is a pet peeve of yours when working with us pushy, needy Director types? Feel free to leave names out for the sake of your professional relations please!
JG: I see, you're up to your old tricks... luring me into a trap with this question. The fact is, every

project is a collaborative effort on so many levels. I think the role of an illustration is to tempt a reader into an article, provide an additional angle from which to view its meaning and also add variety to the visual pacing of the issue as a whole. My most positive experiences have been when the Editor and Art Director have a shared vision or at least have a good working relationship. If there is a breakdown in communication between the Editor and Art Director, the illustration and the illustrator will suffer! It's like an episode of Mad Men. Sometimes Art Directors just need to channel their inner Don Draper!
Theloudcloud.jpg You have reinvented yourself as an artists rep and now run the Loud Cloud Agency. How did you make that transition and what was the motivating factor for you to change your focus?
I have a design degree from California College of the Arts and even though my work is illustrative, I always approach each assignment as a design challenge. Graphic design and illustration share the same roots; not so long ago, there wasn't much of a distinction between the two disciplines. So about a decade into my career, I wanted to expand my studio, much as a designer would. I've always felt like the illustration profession as a whole needed rebranding. Tim Gunn needed to come in and give it some motivational words and a new outfit. So I created The Loud Cloud, called it a Creative Agency and became an LLC. I brought together a small group of artists that walk that line between design and illustration. I encourage the designers to work illustratively and the illustrators to use design intelligence. It took off immediately and we started getting opportunities that were never available to me as a solo illustrator. We've done music videos, iPhone apps, hotel installations, conference identities, motion for commercials, and packaging, but the majority of our work is for magazines and I'm a strong advocate for the future of magazine publishing.
Not only have you done that, you dove into the coding side of things and built out the entire site yourself. That's remarkable. So let's see: Illustrator, Artist Rep, Engineer, Designer... did you always have these ambitions, are you just restless, a control freak or do you have extreme ADD? For the record, I find it totally annoying that you play all these roles so well!
Before I went to design school, I worked in the printing industry for a year. I know how to shoot and process film, burn plates and run a Heidelberg press. I love publishing. I love seeing how ink interacts with different papers. And I'll never lose my fascination with the magic of overlapping colors and varnishes... the smell of the printed page. Understanding that process has been really helpful to me when designing for print. Pressmen love to say "it can't be done," and I know that's bullshit. Now that our work is living on the screen more and more, I felt like I could create for that medium more successfully if I understood how it works. So I started out by learning XHTML, and then Javascript and then PHP and I used those languages to build the Loud Cloud site which can sort and present a large amount of information in simple and useful ways. I don't want to come up with a really exciting idea and have a developer tell me it can't be done. I need to understand my tools and know how to make things happen!
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Got more questions for Joshua? Leave a question in the comment field and you just may get an answer! To see more of Joshua's work check out his website, www.theloudcloud.com.
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Check out past Three Question Interviews
Mathew Bates, Design Director at Backpacker
George McCalman, Art Director at AFAR
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