Malika Favre On The Trap Every Illustrator Falls Into And How To Escape It

Creative Boom: Insight Illustration Malika Favre on the trap every illustrator falls into (and how to escape it) The celebrated French illustrator discusses how to avoid being pigeonholed, her grandfather's rules for making money, and why your friends matter more to your career than the work you produce. Written By: Tom May 30 April 2026 There's a moment when the well-known illustrator Malika Favre describes how she came to hire her second studio assistant. She'd bought a piano on eBay, couldn't get her two hands to do different things, and so had gone online to find a teacher.

Tom was classically trained, had no background in illustration whatsoever, and at the end of one of their lessons, he asked whether he could apply for the job. "I thought long and hard about it," Malika recalls, "and then I realised it kind of makes sense. If this guy can play a really complicated Schubert piece, he can definitely roll a print." Three weeks after he started, an email arrived from the Montreux Jazz Festival, just a short train ride from where he'd grown up, commissioning Malika to design their poster. Tom came along for the whole trip. Funny story. But it's also something more than that.

It's a demonstration of the principle that quietly underpins Malika's entire career: that the most transformative things that happen to you rarely arrive through conventional channels. They arrive through people. Malika was telling this story during a Studio Session, a live talk hosted inside The Studio, Creative Boom's private community for professionals. Her talk—titled 'You and Me, and Everyone We Know' after a Miranda July film she loves—traced her career not through projects or awards, but through the individuals who shaped it.

The trap every illustrator falls into Malika is French, trained originally as a graphic designer, and built her illustration voice over five years at Airside, a small London studio unusual for having illustrators working alongside designers. It was there she first started exploring her personal aesthetic, pitching ideas to an internal shop that let designers produce and sell their own work. Her first pitch was a minimal, cheeky erotic alphabet that sold out in a week and spread across the design blogs. Wallpaper* magazine then commissioned the studio to produce another alphabet for its sex and art issue.

It was a landmark moment: "The first time I was literally paid to do what I was doing for myself," she says. "I had so much fun doing this." Yet success has a habit of narrowing things down. After she left Airside at 28 to go it alone, she noticed something that should be required reading for any emerging illustrator. "You'll only get commissioned for things you've already drawn," she notes. Having drawn erotic alphabets, she was being asked for more of them. Having drawn women with hats, she was asked for more. The one-trick pony trap was looming large. Her solution? The same one Airside had accidentally taught her.

Keep doing personal work, constantly and without commercial expectation, so that your portfolio keeps evolving in directions nobody asked for. "Every time I experimented with something new, eventually it would end up in my portfolio, and I would get commissioned for it later on," she recalls. A part-time agent and a dream commission The same logic applies to business relationships. When Malika was looking for an agent, she nearly went with someone more established. Then she met John Pearce, one of the founders of Handsome Frank.

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The article addresses a common challenge faced by illustrators and offers actionable insights, making it relevant and somewhat novel within the design industry.