Thanks to her background as an art director and an in-house illustrator at The Atlantic, Falls Church, Virginia–based illustrator and designer Katie Martin can create work in three different styles. However, the common factor running through each of her styles is her ability to draw out high-level concepts from her subject matter. “I love making object-based, photorealistic conceptual illustration; I do a fair amount of archival collage; and I sometimes venture into vector-based illustration,” Martin explains. “If anything distinguishes my work, I think it must be the concepts.” As an employee of The Atlantic, she had been designing features under the direction of Paul Spella when she witnessed the magazine’s redesign in 2019 by designers Peter Mendelsund and Oliver Munday; after that, she was encouraged by the magazine’s staff to illustrate—something that terrified her initially. “When the COVID crisis hit, leadership volunteered us fledgling in-house illustrators to create custom pieces for almost every online article,” Martin recalls, “and they published dozens every day. Suddenly, more than half my time was absorbed with generating appropriate illustration concepts that I could actualize within 24 hours or less.” While she quickly settled into the breakneck pace of editorial illustration, she realized that she needed to take on a slower pace, and after the birth of her son, she decided to go freelance. “Now I mull over illustration ideas at the park, the grocery store or the pick-up line, and I work like the wind when the kids are asleep,” she explains. “I’m able to pour much more thought into my concepts and more detail into the finished project.” Inspired by conceptual artists like Derek Brahney, archival artists like Nicolas Ortega and collage artists like Arsh Raziuddin, her former colleague at The Atlantic, Martin strives for clarity in her design work and purity of concept in her illustration. “I hope to help good ideas get the attention they deserve through my illustrations,” she says. “I’d love to bring a little gender diversity into the pool of conceptual illustrators.”