Hark! Can you smell the death of the irksome evangelist coming? The archaic way of thinking that different visual disciplines shouldn't mix, for instance photography + illustration + painting, has long been banished to the creative landfill, never to return to daylight again. To quell the naysayers, a recent Newsweek article is ready to debunk the myth that creative evangelists have a place in the industry, or anywhere else for that matter:

"Many younger architects emphasize the process of investigation and design, rather than committing to an idealized form—a strategy some attribute, ironically, to star Rem Koolhaas and his Rotterdam firm OMA. What distinguishes many of them from their elders is not only what their designs look like—they tend to avoid a signature style—but how they work. They frequently collaborate and often blur the lines between architecture and landscape, urban planning and art. They collaborate with ease across cultures, too. Just look at Malaysian-born, London-based Chris Lee, who has partnered with fellow architect Kapil Gupta of Mumbai to design an ultracool shopping mall in Qatar. Or check out MAD, the team of Chinese-born Yansong Ma and Japanese-born Yosuke Hayano, who are based in Ann Arbor, Michigan—but are working in Guangzhou and Mongolia and just won a big competition in Toronto."

Defy rules, and aim for the moon A look at some of the design industry's biggest names can narrow down their point of concurrence: In the strictest sense, neither their works nor identity bear definition in a single category. Renowned architect Frank Gehry flexes his designing chops into a luxury jewellery line; Daniel Libeskind was a world-class accordion player before he jumped ship to architecture; some years back, when legendary American digital communications consultancy Razorfish was asked during the infamous CBS' 60 Minutes II what is it that the company does, and does so fantastically well, all the flabbergasted CEO Jeffrey Dachis could muster was an abstract-sounding "We radically transform businesses to invent and reinvent them".

Design, epitome of the proverbial free spirit, is gate-crashing through and tearing down all previously erected barriers. Yet, were these barriers supposed to have lasted this far in the first place? As one of 20th-century greatest and most influential architect/designer/filmmaker Charles Eames wisely pointed out, "Everything is connected". So why this inflexibility and persistence in shutting out creative partnerships with other disciplines, effectively blocking out the potential for the birth of unique and striking ideas? Other than a paranoid fear of creative plagiarism, this uncompromising stance also smacks of unfounded design elitism which will ultimately prove to be detrimental to the industry's way forward.

In this age of cross-disciplinary studies and collaborations, is there any conceivable purpose in putting up barriers in the pursuit of each discipline, in the name of preserving the quality of works? For instance, as far as photography can be perceived as an analytic discipline and painting as a synthetic discipline, so can the vice-versa be true. The rigor that goes into the conceptualization of The use of photography and illustration getting increasingly blurred. An image is only as good as the message it is able to convey. Therefore, surprising results may occur if the two are interchangeably used or combined.

Given that both photography and illustration works have commercial value and both can be equally persuasive in their messages, IllustrationMondo breaks down the pros and cons of using photography versus illustration as: