VetFolio is NAVC’s online repository for veterinary education and information. Material is presented via multiple “learning styles.” Depending on the user’s needs and availability, they can read articles, watch videos, listen to podcasts, attend virtual events, or earn certifications. About a week before the new styles were to launch (plenty of time, not), NAVC requested a series of icons to represent each learning style.
I have been designing on a computer for a long time. One of the advantages of computer design is that rough layouts look complete. Clients don’t have to guess based a marker comp or rough sketch how the final design will look. One of the big disadvantages is, well, rough layouts look complete. There is no wiggle room. Elements become set in stone at a very early stage.
So, in order to speed up the process of design for this project, I decided to slow it down and went old school. I got out my old mechanical pencil and a pad of tissue paper and, one Friday afternoon (when, really, I was about done for the day/week), I just started sketching. I kind of knew where this was going to go pretty quickly, but sketching let me work out the broad strokes without getting bogged down in the nitty gritty of creating final art from the get-go.
By early the next week, I had started creating finished artwork. And those broad strokes didn’t change a whole lot from those initial sketches. However, by creating the finals a bit later in the process, I was able to pin down some of the finer design elements while looking at the bigger picture of how each icon worked within the set. A week after those first sketches were drawn, the updated site (with the new learning style icons) went live.