The Process of Illustrating an Essay #3/16
The third essay I had been preparing to publish on Medium required some illustrations too. The title is - "Elephants, Targets and Beacons" and it's about setting the goals.
[skip this paragraph if you had already read any other Process of Illustrating an Essay]
The essay is a part of a series of 16 essays that describe my personal experience and observations of other entrepreneurs struggling with making websites for their businesses. 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.
[end of skip]
The key idea of this essay is the importance of having and formulating a business goal as clearly as possible. I had started by putting a lighthouse on a rocky island as a symbol of light to those desperately looking for the shore at night at sea. It is also a thing to aim at when you are lost or don't know which way to direct your vessel.
I had played with the way the lighthouse might look and added some land birds whose purpose was to represent hope - that the land is somewhere nearby.
Making the "goal" bigger seemed like a good idea...
Having a large moon next to the "goal" made the birds look like vampire bats... It looks cool but it's probably too much.
This is the final version. The text block and one extra bird are located on the rays from the lighthouse to direct the eye back to the lighthouse in case it drifts away. The moon is gone.
You can read the essay yourself or forward it to someone who is making a website and would appreciate the importance of setting business goals.
