Bringing things to life

I’ve been meaning to add illustrations to this site for a long time.

I’ve always imagined them as little sketches rather than photographs. Partly because they give me an excuse to draw, but mostly because I think they communicate the ideas better. I enjoy the challenge of taking something quite broad or complicated and seeing if I can distil it into a little square.

So far, I’ve illustrated three posts.

Tangles

A post about how apparently simple problems often hide a tangle of competing demands. The visible issue is rarely the whole story.

Thankfully, the illustration wasn’t nearly as tangled as the subject. It was one of those ideas where the obvious image turned out to be the right one.

Make it professional, make it pop

A post about those wonderfully vague bits of creative feedback, and what people are often trying to say when they use them.

I wanted the sketch to capture that little moment of understanding. The point where everything suddenly snaps into place because you’ve stopped listening to the words and started listening to the intent behind them.

The cost of features

This post is about how we often talk about digital projects in terms of features rather than goals.

The sketch came from the idea of gradual imbalance. Very few products become awkward overnight. They drift there, one perfectly reasonable decision at a time.

For all of these, I wanted to keep the style consistent. One brush, three tones, and something that feels close to the sketches my clients see when I’m working through ideas.

There are plenty more posts that need illustrating. I’m looking forward to gradually filling the archive with them.