Building with Nature Illustrations

Professor Jill Slinger from the Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management of Delft University of Technology asked me to design some thematic illustrations for her second Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on Building with Nature. This was the first assignment of a long series of visualisations supporting professor Slinger's teaching and research. These illustrations have also been used in this other project from my portfolio.

Process

Some module icons had been created for her previous MOOC on the same topic, so I continued designing the new illustrations in the same style. After completing the individual images, I was asked to put them in a connecting path. I first tried to make an overview visual where the topics of the module icons were materialized (first image below). After some brainstorming sessions we concluded that the path should be more abstract and some design iterations followed (second and third image). Even though we did not use the first version, she did like this image a lot, and commissioned me to design something like that for one of her research paradigms. However, due to the complexity of this research I moved from 2D drawing to an axonometric drawing to be able to use depth and layers in the image, thus allowing for more information density. This currently unpublished layer image, was later synthesized to form the cover (fourth image below) of the book on the same topic.

Icon series

Simultaneously with these design assignments, I was asked to make icons for the theoretical principles from the Building with Nature courses. She had previously made some small icons herself, and asked me to reassess and redesign these, and on top of that to design many more icons for the other, newly introduced principles. She gave me small descriptions of the principles, that resulted in the design the icons shown in the images below.