Harriet Yakub finds the funny in the everyday, and turns it into cartoon-like illustrations

There's a game Harriet Yakub likes to play. She calls it 1+1=3, where she takes two ordinary things that have no business being in the same room, places them side by side, and something entirely new emerges. It's a formula she borrowed from a mentor early in her career, and it has since become the pillar behind everything she makes. 

"I like to observe people and myself, and take notice of things that I find amusing or insightful," she says. Harriet keeps notebooks full of these moments, whether that's stray thoughts, overhead conversations, or something she spots on a commute to work. All of which she files away for later, just in case they become relevant again. And more often than not, they do.

Growing up in Dublin as a first-generation Irish illustrator with Ukrainian parents, Harriet has always been drawn to the gap between the real and the imagined. She studied illustration at NCAD and, after graduating, threw herself into the music scene, building a freelance practice there before moving into editorial and brand work. She entered awards with a kind of optimism that comes from genuinely wanting to be seen. It's Nice That named her in their Next Generation list; she received a Yellow Pencil from D&AD, and the Institute of Designers in Ireland recognised her moving-image work. Soon, clients caught a whiff of it, too, including The New York Times, Penguin Random House, and Huawei, as well as festival showings in Lyon, Shanghai, and Dublin.

"I like that world of idealised childlike wonder, grounded in something very adult and emotional," she explains. "Cartoons are an even more concentrated version of that, and then when I spot something cartoon-like in real life, it all comes full circle, and it feels like the recipe for a perfect illustration." Slipping on a banana peel, drinking whiskey from a brown paper bag – these things happen, she notes, partly because we've seen someone do them in a movie first. So, in this sense, she explains how we live through the images we've absorbed, and in doing so, we become briefly, beautifully absurd. 

Harriet's process begins with words before she gets her hand on a pencil. When given a brief, she'll run through associations, hunting for that unexpected pairing, that 1+1=3. Then come the sketches, the colour blocks and, finally, the most meditative part: the hand-drawn etching, each stroke scratched in one by one, layered up with texture until the image has weight and warmth and a kind of pleasing roughness. The results feel familiar but slightly off, in the best possible way. 

Take F for Fly, part of her self-published series Makewatch, which depicts a bunch of balloons trapped on some wires, grinning through it all. "There's something about inanimate objects acting animately that gets me every time," she says. "I like thinking of balloons as alive, and that they're being trapped when wishing to fly, all with a forced smile on their face." It's a tiny, funny image with something genuinely melancholy underneath it – the kind of illustration that makes you laugh and then makes you think about why you're laughing.

A newer work, Junk Mail, is part of an upcoming project that she's keeping close to her chest for now. The concept is the strange, convincing quality of spam mail, and the very human instinct to look for meaning in something utterly ordinary, like your glass of water, or an email that almost, almost sounds real. It's a theme that runs through everything she makes: the sense that introspection is always available to us if we take the time to notice. "I'd love for people to be inspired to slow down and take notice of themselves," she says. "It's more a way of life, an observation of self."