Artwork

To help the program stand out, I decide to hire a freelance artist to develop illustrations based on the program that we could use in print and digital media. Science Friday had worked with Carrie Lapolla previously on educational projects. Her work looked like a great fit for Sun Camp as well.

We met and I reviewed the program summary with her. I also explained what I wanted in the way of style--vector art that was simple without being simplistic with bold colors that heavily accented the space components of the program. I needed a "hero" image at high resolution that would serve as the main illustration for the program. I also wanted five images to represent the theme for each of the five weeks of the program. These would be lower resolution and smaller because they'd only be used online. And I asked for additional line art with details on each project.

Carrie started by sketching several compositions for the hero image. I selected the composition that I thought would be best for use online and provided space for text if needed. We then did another round of designs, iterating on that basic composition. When I brought those to the team, they noticed that the proportions were off and gave a distorted sense of distance. I brought the feedback to Carrie and she iterated again. On the third round, we had a design we all liked.

Next it was time to add color. Carrie nailed this on the first try, honestly. The only issue was that the space probe she included in the upper right hand corner, didn't stand out well. I asked her to highlight and we had our hero image.

Used Canva to add text as needed for the website. We tried a lot of different fonts and styles. For the sake of accessibility, it's important to ensure there is good contrast and readability. Used the Chrome extension Colorblindly to test the image to ensure it would be easy to read. Eventually, we found something that we could all agree on. I also drafted alt text and included it as a note in the image file on Canva so if anyone else used the image, they would have the proper information.

We then moved on to developing the weekly themed images. We wanted to tie in directly to the hero image to represent each of the themes that would be explored in the Q&A sessions, rather than focusing on the hands-on projects. Again we started with sketches, shared them with the team, iterated, and finally added color. The only hitch we had along the way was that the image with the seasons for week 3 did not emphasize the elliptical orbit and axis tilt accurately enough. For this phase, I did provide reference images from NASA to help ensure that the images were accurate.