Charles Hively was always drawing something as a kid. Heads, mostly, and trees. His parents enrolled him in the Famous Artists correspondence school while he was still in high school, and from there he moved into advertising, founding two agencies, winning a Clio, an Effie, and a One Show Gold Pencil. The common thread through all of it was illustration. Every major award Hively won involved an illustrator's work. He had started out as one himself and never stopped thinking like one, even after decades on the other side of the desk.
A stint as co-publisher at Graphis magazine opened his eyes to a new generation of illustrators, and in 2003 he did what felt inevitable: he launched 3x3, the first magazine entirely dedicated to contemporary illustration. The title is a formula — three profiles per issue, three times three equals nine featured artists — and the publication itself is as precisely constructed as its name suggests. Beautifully printed, lavishly designed, and built around the conviction that illustration deserves the same curatorial attention that photography and fine art take for granted.
For ten years, 3x3 did exactly what Hively intended. It profiled illustrators in depth, ran a juried international annual that became one of the most respected competitions in the field, published directories, hosted portfolio reviews and workshops, and generally served as the industry's memory — preserving work that would otherwise vanish into the scroll of social media feeds. In 2014, the magazine was named one of the 100 most influential publications of all time. That same year, Hively put it on hiatus.
The reason was brutally honest: social media had arrived, and with it the feeling that a print magazine dedicated to showcasing illustrators had lost its purpose. Instagram could do in seconds what 3x3 did in pages. Art directors could find new talent with a hashtag. The magazine had never made money — newsstand distribution barely covered printing and shipping — and the audience seemed to be migrating elsewhere.
Then, six years later, in the middle of a pandemic, Hively brought it back. He had surveyed his readership and found that a significant portion still wanted the physical object — not just to look at, but to study, to refer back to, to keep on a shelf as a permanent record of what illustrators were doing right now. He remembered his own early career, blowing up ads from the Art Directors Club annuals to figure out what size the type was, what the leading looked like, learning by reverse-engineering the printed page. Social media could not do that. It was too fast, too disposable, too flat. Steve Heller, the veteran design critic, called the reborn 3x3 "the most luscious of all magazines devoted to the wonderful art of illustration."
Today, Hively is still the editor, publisher, and design director — all three hats at once, as he has worn them from the start. He oversees over 1,200 pages of content annually across the magazine, the annual, the directory, and Creative Quarterly. Issue 33 had obvious significance given the title, and by then almost a hundred illustrators had been profiled in the magazine's pages. Each issue also features a section called Seen & Noted, spotlighting eighteen additional artists, plus an Icon — an illustrator whose personal voice has remained constant throughout their career — and a Legend, someone who made their mark in the 1960s and 70s.
There is something quietly defiant about 3x3's existence in 2026. It is a print magazine about illustration in an age when both print and illustration are routinely declared obsolete. Hively's answer to this is characteristically direct: as long as there are illustrators doing distinctive work, there will be something to put on the page. The absolute wonder, he says, is the diversity of personal voices, the multitude of different treatments of art. That is not going to change. Not even if everything else does.
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