Conference Notes on “Inspiration to Story — A Visual Journey”
A masterclass by Ranganath Krishnamani during DesignUp 2018, Bangalore | 25 -28 Oct
I attended masterclass conducted by Ranganath Krishnamani, Creative Director of Liquidink Design during DesignUp 2018 conference. Here are my notes from his masterclass “Inspiration to Story A Visual Journey”
A product uses content, visual design, user experience, illustrations, animations and transitions to communicate a story to its users. The masterclass explained the importance and guidelines for creating meaningful illustrations
- Illustrations are super powerful in communicating the product stories, brand values, guiding users in the right direction and emoting right responses from the users
- Illustrations can be used for Empty States, Progress Indicators, Product/Landing Pages, Onboarding and Broken Experiences
- Illustrations need to serve “Beautification with purpose” and build thinking patterns in scenarios where users don’t know what to do next, product features are not used, too much text to read and to connect to users
- To master the art of illustration and to come up with creative ideas designer needs to carefully observe the small details from her surroundings (people, cultures, ethnicity, colors, textures, etc.), stretch her creative limits to come up with multiple ideas (not just settle for the first idea or solution), sketch & storyboard ideas with paper & pencil before moving to computer tools
Guidelines for creating effective illustrations:
- Identify Why? Can illustrations make users smarter and better at using your product? What kind of bigger idea and message illustrations will communicate?
- Being useful: Treat illustrations as natural progression of product experience. Split bigger ideas into smaller pieces. Provide context and clarity. Empathize with users whether they will get the big idea through illustrations.
- Being Consistent: Illustrators use “vantage points” to depict the bigger picture and tell stories. Pay attention to little visual cues (light source, line weights, color weights, shadows, proportions, etc.), use recognizable palette of 2–3 colors, create personality and visual patterns, document illustration guidelines as part of your product design system, educate and align teams to single illustration style.
- Complete experiences: Illustrations not only enhance the user experience but also helps to tighten the loose ends in the overall product experience. Use illustrations to create warmth and delight by guiding the user to the right experience.
- Identify Principles for creating illustrations: Serious — Playful, Contemporary — Retro, Geometric — Organic, Realistic — Abstract, Calm — Energetic, Simple — Defined
- Associate keywords to drive product illustrations: Trustworthy, Confident, Empowering, Inspirational and Enthusiastic
Ranganath walked us through his awesome design projects where illustrations acted as super powerful connectors e.g. Skylark Drones, Wealthy.in, Uber, Design Genome Project — Invision, Gap.inc, care.fit and many more.
He gave all participants multiple design exercises to realize the importance of sketching and refine our natural strokes. We were also asked to create illustration storyboard concepts for one of the projects e.g. collaborative working, health and fitness and travel. Following are my masterclass sketches
