In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, our client set to work on developing a medication that could help treat the disease, with the aim of reducing a person’s risk of having to be hospitalised. As part of this, they wanted to know at which points during a person’s ‘journey’ with the disease would be easiest and most effective to provide them with such a medication.
Following on from the research, our client commissioned an interactive infographic that they could distribute to their staff, so that everyone could learn the optimal points in time to give patients the treatment in a hands-on, engaging way.
Additional team members: Jes Rogerson (Senior Designer)
CLIENT
Major pharmaceutical company
(Unnamed for purposes of confidentiality)
AGENCY
Research Partnership
ROLE
Design Direction, Illustration, Interactivity Design & Implementation
SOFTWARE
Illustrator, InDesign
The final piece needed to clearly outline each disease stage that a person who has COVID-19 would go through, starting with where and how people believed they had contracted the disease, through to testing and trying to manage their illness, and ending with how COVID-19 was still affecting them post-recovery and how it might impact their future. The deliverable also had to provide a method of drilling down into the statistical detail of each of these stages, to back up the anecdotal findings from the patient interviews with quantifiable data.
When discussing the brief with our client, they said that one of the most important things for them was for the artwork to have a very appealing, illustrative feel to it, whilst also remaining clear about what was happening within the journey. They were keen for any illustrations of people to have a universal feel and not be too heavily set within one particular country, given the global nature of the pandemic and the worldwide, multi-market scope of the research that was undertaken.
Whilst making the interface as visually appealing as possible was a top priority for the client, the most important consideration was ensuring the deliverable was as easy to use as possible for the broadest user base, and to clearly communicate the narrative of the research findings. To achieve this, the interactive was developed through a number of phases, starting with sketches and paper prototypes all the way through to the final design. This included a testing phase where we asked people to engage with the interactive and provide feedback, both on their understanding of the story being told and how easy it was to physically navigate the deliverable.
Once the structure and content of the interactive was finalized and agreed, we developed an illustrative style that took inspiration from Art Deco poster artists such as Leo Marfurt combined with modern illustration trends, utilising brush settings and stippling effects to create artwork that felt more organic than a clean vector style. We deliberately avoided details on the faces in order to allow an element of projection from the viewer onto the person in the illustration.
Contrasting against the painterly style of the illustrations, the icons for communicating data visualization elements or points of information were created in a conventional vector lineart style in order to be clearly legible even when displayed at smaller sizes on the screen, incorporating the client’s brand colours to reinforce the idea that the treatment that they had developed could help patients to ‘take ownership’ over the disease.
The client was very pleased with the end result, saying that it had been extremely well-received by their staff when used as the method to give the initial presentation of findings, rather than using slides or handout documents. One of their colleagues liked the output so much that they got in touch and commissioned our team to create an interactive deliverable for one of their own projects for a different product!
