Informative, beautiful and deeply human: it’s time to cheer the underrated art of illustration | Oliver Jeffers

We do judge books by their covers. Illustrations spark young imaginations, solve problems, present information - and shape our world, says the children’s author on National Illustration Day

Since the origin of our species, humans have tried to make sense of chaos, to understand ourselves, and – at least until the divisiveness of social media – to understand each other. We have always relied on communication to do this. And thousands of years before we had written language, and possibly before even complex spoken language, we used pictures.

This makes sense: as children, we learn to read facial expressions, body language and images long before we learn to read words. We all grow up with an instinctive urge to make visual marks and tell stories. If constellations were humanity’s first attempt to understand the universe, then they were also our first illustrated stories. Humans are and have always been a story-driven species, and we tell these stories in myriad ways.