The Process of Illustrating an Essay #1/16
The essay I had been preparing to publish on Medium required some illustrations. The title called "Web apps, Seeds and Time travel" is a first in a series of 16 that describes my personal experience and observations of other entrepreneurs struggling with making websites for their business ventures. It took me 5 months to write the series, so, the challenge was to make illustrations fast - within 3 hours per each essay and make each artwork recognizable as a part of a collection.
Medium has a quirky way of cutting images onto "almost-squares" and a 1 : 3.333 ratio. That produces another challenge because you can't really choose which image goes where. I have decided to use Futura typeface and two primary colors across all illustrations; black, greys and white don't count, of course.
I have started by putting the main tagline in the center of the artboard.
From here, I have created several options with different colors:
I decided to increase the main tagline and see what happens:
I had set my mind on the primary background color and decided to iterate with it. I had included the Rake as the element to spice up the artwork.
I have increased the size of the T letter and that presented a perfect opportunity to cut out the dates in the letter itself.
The design looked too clean to my taste. So I had to think what to clutter it with in a meaningful way.
To have a more pleasant flow for the eye I had put the title of the essay on the top right area and introduced a line that directs to this group. I had cut out the "minus" object from the box in order to have both the "minus box" and "Zero" to be the same size and look like a group. Now, the "minus" text looks like an actual minus (-) sign; it also produced an effect that the color belongs here and not accidental.
I had also included some autumn leaves to help the Rake and add another dimension to the artwork.
You can read the essay yourself or forward it to someone who is building a website for their small business or a bootstrapped startup. It will help founders and business owners to avoid stepping on the same rake other entrepreneurs including myself had already put our feet down on numerous times.
