Colombian Illustrator Daniel Lievano Turns Everyday Ideas Into Award-Winning Visual Language
Colombian illustrator Daniel Lievano tells ColombiaOne how his background in advertising and graphic design shaped an impactful visual language that combines metaphors, symbols, associations, and words. His work has earned him international recognition, including a gold medal from the Society of Illustrators of New York.
Lievano studied at Jorge Tadeo Lozano University in Bogota, where he developed an interest in the relationship between ideas, words, and visual communication. “I believed sounds and visuals were a mixture of senses,” he said, recalling what first drew him to advertising. Graphic design gave him the tools to draw, design, and sketch, while learning that every element communicates a message—from the typeface to the colors of each creation.
Lievano does not practice either advertising or graphic design today, but feels illustration occupies an intermediate place between them. “It’s like a point at the center of a triangle that has it all: power of communication, power of expression, concrete and abstract communication,” he said.
That realization came about three years after he graduated. Unable to find a specific place or office for the kind of work he wanted to do, he decided to do it himself, drawing comics and posting them on social media. “I noticed this has traction, and I thought I could do more,” he explained.
Asked how he combines visual metaphors, symbols, associations and words in his work, Lievano traced the idea back to a graphic design history class about cave paintings in France and Argentina, and in Colombia’s Chiribiquete. Those images, made before humans could write or even speak, convinced him that the visual communicated before words did and that images can carry more symbolic weight than words themselves. A drawing of a house, or a traffic light placed indoors instead of on a street, he said, becomes a symbol the moment context shifts its expected meaning.
His interest in etymology, which also shapes his work, began in a high school class taught by an American teacher, James Hain, on suffixes, lexemes, prefixes, and Greek, Latin, and Arabic roots. He gave the Spanish word “recuerdo” (memory) as an example: built from “re,” meaning again, and “cordis,” meaning heart, a word that literally means to pass again through the heart. “It’s a taste,” he said, when asked whether this kind of analysis is taught at university.
The book behind the gold medal
Lievano’s graphic novel Gravity, published in 2020, grew out of curiosity rather than a search for recognition. The book is structured around chapters exploring time, gravity, and memory. “I wasn’t doing it for the vanity of novelty, like wanting to win awards. There’s something more human there, which is curiosity,” he said, comparing the feeling to a child opening a drawer of toys.
His favorite chapter is the last one, on gravity, which also gave the graphic novel its title. He said gravity is usually associated only with what is taught in physics class, even though everything is affected by it. Hair falls, but trees grow; leaves fall from branches that keep rising. That contradiction led him to compare gravity to emotions: felt and named, but never fully understood.
Lievano said he is not comfortable with traditional networking, such as the portfolio-and-business-card meetups common in illustration circles in the United States and the United Kingdom. Instead, he prefers entering contests in those two countries, which he considers the strongest markets in his field.
He submitted Gravity to the Society of Illustrators of New York and unexpectedly won its top prize, a Gold Medal in the Book category. “I said, this can’t be happening,” he recalled. The award opened the door to other prizes, magazines, and catalogs. He credits part of that success to having his own voice: unlike most illustration work, which interprets someone else’s text, Gravity was his own idea, illustrated with full intention and freedom.
Recognition, steady work and a new book on the way
Knowing early on that freelance illustration is not an easy career to live off, he aimed his work at outlets abroad from the start. Before the book, he had already worked internationally on and off with The Lancet, the UK medical journal, and The Boston Globe, in the United States, while also working in his father’s family engineering business to support himself.
It was in 2020, during the pandemic, once he had presented a more consolidated project like the book and it began winning awards, that work from international magazines and outlets started arriving almost overnight, allowing him to finally work independently, full time, on illustration alone. He said publication in an established outlet functions as its own advertising, and that work keeps coming as a result, including this year, when he chose to pause new commissions to focus on personal projects, though offers kept arriving. He said he never takes that for granted, especially as the illustration industry faces the impact of new technologies.
Lievano is already working on his next book. The project explores what he calls “the identity of lines,” starting from the idea of a point that traveled and became a line, and examining why a “deviation” carries negative connotations in many cultures, while a straight line is associated with tradition and correctness. He said he is researching the idea visually as he builds the book.