How to sketch a UX article

Transcript

1. UX Australia 2019 -30th August, Breakout session (AUUXAU3008E) JUSTIN CHEONG: Testing, hello. Thank you, Matt, that was really good. The mouldy contents in the fridge is a metaphor that's going to stick with me. Thank you for joining me for this talk. Can I get a show of hands who has been... later in this conference? There's quite a lot of you, which is really cool and encouraging to see more and more designers practising visual note taking. My name is Justin. I would like to share a few of my illustrations for the past year as well as the process behind them. So hopefully that gives you some ideas to how you can approach creating visual things, whether it's illustrations or visual communication. So I'm a designer and researcher but for the past month I've also been an illustrator for the Adobe Design blog. Here's the blog and there's a link to the blog as well if you're interested to check it out. It's a place of stories and articles about user experience and human design and I've been creating an illustration for every design story that comes out and no, these are not Stock illustration, these are used for the article and meant to represent the article and nothing further. And who has had a look on Adobe's website? I've created about 65 of these and I continue to make these week in and week out. It's been pretty crazy, but it's been a lot of fun and also I'm going to illustrate with some special authors as well. Liz who we heard yesterday and her keynote, and the pioneer of human-centred design and so on. Now whenever I share these with people, they generally say, wow, that's really cool, but occasionally I will get someone who is curious who comes up and says "How do you make these? What's the process?" And when I hear that I say "I'm really glad you asked" because it's actually not an easy problem. How do I go about taking it, breaking it down and representing it in one image. How do I keep these images fresh and appealing so that it draws people's attention. And how do I do this week after week, month after month and continue to keep it fresh? As you can tell from these notes, creating an illustration from an article, it's not simple alchemy. I'm happy to report that after much trial and error, I've landed on a fairly reliable editorial illustration and it's stepped my illustration process up similar to the design process. So let me take you to an example of how I get to the illustration, how I get from an article to an illustration. This was an image I created for an article about culture design. Here are the steps. Step one, discovery. Here is where I interrogate the article and really try and figure out what it's trying to say. So it's like a user interview where the article is the user and like sometimes I'll investigate by looking at the author and other articles that they've done, other talks they've given, just really trying to understand it. Take lots of notes, as you can see. Step two is visual synthesis, so first of all I look at my mind map, and I highlight the key things. I underline words that I think might be good search terms for where I go and look at some imagery. And also try and figure out, you know, what are some of these images that represent the ideas that come straight out of my mind. At the same time, I'll go to Google, I'll go to the noun project, which is a good resource for
2. UX Australia 2019 -30th August, Breakout session (AUUXAU3008E) Page 2 of 2 looking up iconography, and I will use those as resources so inspire more imagery. So I will try to get more and more input. I might also go and talks by the author or related talk to get a better sense of the topic all the meanwhile I'm trying to come up with imagery. It's a bit like Pictionary. How would I draw that? How would I draw that? These images feed into step three which is ideation. So in this step, I try to put down many miniature versions of the ideas that I can and I tried to as many as possible because this is a stage where ideals are cheap. If I ever run out of ideas, I also go to a random word generator, this was inspired by Edward De Bono's book, how to create ideas, and I pick random words and I try to make associations in my head to go how can I think about this differently to come up with a new idea, a new idea. For every single piece I try to have at least ten or more ideas and bear in mind, by definition, all of these, except one, will make it at the end but this is part of the process for creating something good, you need to discard a lot of things along the way. From there I take my favourite ideas and I ex pand them onto a larger thumbnail and this helps me to narrow down. These take a little more, not that much more effort, but I expand the detail and go does this really look right? And then that leads into step four, which is refinements. Here I take two of my favourite thumbnails and I, again, expand them and go how does this work? I've gout got to put down the details, and these are the ones I select because I think they're the most representative and most visually appealing and then I refine these to my editor, who picks one, and from there I do a brush up line work and the colour. This is the part that makes people think of as drawing or illustration. Personally, I actually have a helper who is - I've got an assistant who helps me with the colour, she's way better at it than I am but we've learnt a lot from each other as well, to really try to make it pop. As you can see there's a lot of steps before that as well to get to that stage. That's really it. Here's a mosaic of the illustrations I've done so far and as you can see, it's not that simple but also quite possible if you follow a process. Each article represents its own challenge, so the ones with abstract concepts are harder, obviously, things like culture design, design system, design ethics, artificial intelligence, less concrete ideas tend to be more difficult. But having said that, I found in matter the topic, following this process is generally pretty robust. Until I've gotten used to doing this I've deployed this for different visualisation work. So I hope this gives you ideas for how you can approach visualising ideas too. The process should be effective for all kinds of visual communication. For example, just knowing that doing multiple thumbnails will increase your chances of landing on a good idea. Behind these 65 illustrations are over 1,000 discarded ideas through the process of creativity. Wrapping up, I just want to say thanks to my editor, Patrick, and my assistant Annie who have been incredible at enabling this. Check out the blog, we're continuing to make these for the forseeable future. Thank you. (Applause)