Visual Design - ILD Project
Tools Used: Adobe Animate, Adobe Illustrator, Google Docs
Receiving the Project
As a freelance designer for Chicago Developer Network, I worked remotely with "CHEST", an online medical journal that covers chest diseases and issues related to chest diseases.
I was responsible for redesigning their current Illustrations to help them communicate about health issues to their customers. The most challenging of the redesigns was the ILD Family Tree, a visual representation used to help categorize various related health issues into groups and specific causes.
The Tree
Taking a look at the original ILD Tree's design, we can see that the health issues and their related causes are categorized into branches, which are further broken down into sprouting leaves. In theory, this can be a great way to help communicate information to their users. However, the legibility and focus of the information is obscured by the indiscriminate leaves, the lack of contrasting color, and the small text crammed within the leaves.
Identified Issues:
-
Information that is grouped together should be easily identified.
-
The information presented should not feel cluttered.
-
The aesthetics should not shift the user's focus away from the information provided.
The Challenge
"How can I fit a sentence-long word into a small space
that is both legible and appealing to look at?"
To summarize, the challenge my team was solving for in the design of the ILD Tree is that many of the specific health diseases forced the text to be shrunken down and crammed into the leaves.
Before I could start solving these issues, I needed to design a layout for the tree itself, redesign the leaves for better text legibility, and to identify who my user is to help influence my design choices.
I worked with my team to learn more about CHEST's users. CHEST's analytics help to inform us that most of their users are 60 or older, which makes it likely that their vision is deteriorating. I also considered that 1 in 12 men have some form of color blindness that would need to be accommodated for.
Design Guidelines:
-
The font must be legible within the leaves.
-
Color choices must be accessible for people with visual impairments and/or color blindness.
Concept Phase
I began to draft my first few concepts with a geometric approach because CHEST wanted to try out a clean and simple style.
While creating my first concept, I began to identify and highlight each major branch with different colors within the tree, and began experimenting with layouts. Taking the idea of different colored leaves from the original image, I utilized different shades of color and brightness to help define categories within the tree.
As we progressed, the tree would continue to have its layout refined to reduce it's forked appearance and make it look more natural.
First Layout Concept
First Concept
Refined Layout
Solving The Challenge
Throughout the various drafts of new leaves, I found that the words could not fit unless they were unreadably small or if the leaves were overwhelmingly big. With this in mind, I further utilized geometric shapes and used a large ovular shape to represent a patch of leaves.
I was able to create a foreground, background, and middle ground using multiple layers of leaf patches to emphasize different parts of the graphic. The foreground contains the names of the health issues presented while the background gives the tree shape and separates it from the scenery, and the middle-ground assists in identifying categories that are close together if the different colors aren't enough.
Drafting Phase
With the layout now complete, and the main issues of the leaves and text solved, I began to work through my drafts . While drafting the final graphic, the placement of the leaves would be further refined, and the branches would be curved organically to contrast with the geometric leaves.
Second Draft
Final Draft
