illustrating with Catherine Madden

Aug 23

I recently chatted with illustrator, designer, creative director, facilitator and synthesizer Catherine Madden. We recorded our conversation, which you can listen to in the latest podcast episode or watch (and see all the awesome visuals Catherine shared) in the SWD community video (available to premium subscribers).

Those who own my second book, Let’s Practice!, are already familiar with Catherine’s work, as she illustrated the many amazing chapter recaps and sticky notes. The following is a repost of her case study on Let’s Practice! showcasing her process, which Catherine shares on her site, catherinemadden.com.

Summary

In the fall of 2018, Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic reached out to see if I would be interested in collaborating on some illustrations for a new workbook she had in mind. I really loved Cole’s first book, Storytelling with Data: A Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals and knew that I wanted to be involved. Cole was still shaping her ideas around the final form the book would take, but knew that she wanted to include sketchnote summaries of each chapter from the first book, so that’s where my involvement began. Fast forward to October 2019, and a brand new beautiful book with 450 pages written by Cole, illustrated and designed by me, and laid out by Flight Design Co. Here’s how it all came to life….

December 2018–January 2019

Early on, the scope was quite small…I was simply focused on creating sketchnote summaries of the chapters of Cole’s first book. The idea was that these illustrations would introduce each chapter of an in-progress workbook that mirrored Book 1. Cole wrote out short outlines of the chapters so I didn’t have to decide for myself what the most important concepts were. The first round of design included one chapter of sketchnotes illustrated three different styles. I played with both vector and raster-based illustrations, as well as full color floods and white backgrounds, and different variations of my handwriting/illustration styles. After a design review and discussion, we landed on a combination of two different styles and the vector based illustrations (in hindsight, the only file format that would have worked)—and I got started on the rest of the summaries.

January–February 2019

Once we agreed on the style, I worked on my iPad in Adobe Draw to complete all of the sketchnote summaries. I recolored, resized, and adjusted each layout in Illustrator, and then marked up printed copies of the set to review with any inconsistencies and errors. During this time, Cole was writing away and the book was taking shape to become a full-on companion book with practice exercises.

It had been a while since I’ve worked on something that needed this type of attention to detail and refinement. Marking up edits and checking them off as I fixed them brought me back to my days as a print layout designer circa 2008-09, and it was fun to dust off those skills!

February–April 2019

When Cole’s Google doc manuscript and chapter summaries were close to final, we realized there were several images within the chapters that would look better in my illustration style. I was curious how the sketchnote summaries and illustrations would tie into the rest of the book design, so I created a sample chapter layout based on first book design. This helped us to see all of the illustrations and design elements playing together. We experimented with different options for page size, font size, and margins to minimize the page count.

Usually this part of a book process is done with the publisher after final edits are complete, but ideas were flowing and it was influencing Cole’s edits. After running the numbers, Cole decided to have me take the design over the finish line and deliver print ready files to the publisher. At this point I brought in Matt from Flight Design Co. to help formalize a workflow to take us from manuscript to final book files.

April 2019

When Cole was working on incorporating her first round of edits into the Google doc manuscript, we had about two weeks to dive into the cover design. Luckily, Cole had a very clear vision in her head to compliment Book 1, and we only really had to go back and forth about small tweaks to the lettering placement, script size, and back cover elements. This was a super fun and relatively easy part of the process!

May–July 2019

Once then manuscript was complete, it was up to Matt to take all 450 pages and insert them into the final layout. He would send over 2-3 chapters at a time to me, where I would look through and try to catch any edits that involved image placement, text breaking, and illustrations. We’d go back and forth before sending larger chunks of chapters to Cole for her review. Cole had the monumental task of gathering and compiling edits from several different people, printing out and marking up a physical book, and then commenting ALL of the changes (there were SO MANY!) into a PDF. The image you see is my print copy of the *almost* final draft, and every single sticky marker is an edit color coded by who is responsible to edit. It was a major team effort to get this over the finish line!

The final stages involved cleaning up all of our files, making sure all of the images were the correct color settings and resolution, and packaging up the entire book into a print-ready document with cover files to boot. This type of attention to detail is not my default, and so I’m incredibly grateful for Matt’s support as we worked through it together.

August–October 2019

The book was with the publisher and printer during this time. Cole took a visit to watch them on the press (check out the photos in her blog post!) and we waited excitedly to see how they turned out. I’m really thrilled with the final result, and proudly recommend the book to anyone who has ever had to deliver a presentation that references data.

Take a look at some of the spreads and detailed illustrations below!