How to approach layout design for medical illustration
By: Annie Campbell
Tags: Design Thinking, Design Process, Sciart, Medical Illustration, Layout

Understand the messaging

As with any other project, the first things you need to define are:

What do you want to show?

What do you want your audience to know?

What are the important key players of this story?

If you haven’t defined these things then you will find it challenging to move forward in an optimal direction when it comes to the final layout design.

So here’s an example:

What do you want to show?

I want to show atherosclerosis What do you want your audience to know?

They need to understand what an artery looks like and what atherosclerosis looks like. They should also understand that this is a gradual buildup What are the important key players of this story?

Artery, red blood cells, fibrin, platelets, fatty deposits, and some associated text.

Do some market research

Next, you want to see if anyone has done something similar to this in your field. I do this so that I have an understanding of what’s available in the market as well as what good or bad trends are being repeated. I can then use these examples as baseline to try and do something a little different to what’s already available. Personally, I don’t think there’s any value on copying or repeating something that’s already been done — you’re only going to shortchange yourself and not grow creatively.

Do some inspiration research

Once I’ve done my market research the next step for me is to go and look at other parts of the creative industry, such as graphic design or web design, for layout inspiration. I usually save these as links, take screen grabs or pin them to a private Pinterest mood board. When I’m doing this I look for designs that catch my eye or designs that might be on-trend.

Translate what you like into design thinking

Now, this is probably the hardest part for most people and that’s breaking down what you like about a piece of inspiration into simple design thinking.

Once I’ve gathered about 5 to 10 pieces of inspiration I’ll have them opened together on my Pinterest board or on Adobe Bridge so that I can see them all at once. This way I can begin to pinpoint any repeating design ideas that I like, notice any immediate trends between these selected pieces, and also to identify what design ideas could be translated into my own layout.

When I was first starting out I wrote this stuff down, like the example image below, but now that I have more practice I can list and remember these in my head. If you want to practice putting design ideas into words then it might also be useful reading this article as well as reading up on design fundamentals.

Speed layout

Once I have all of this information in place I’ll dive into photoshop or even pen and paper to start creating multiple layout ideas for my project. To make sure that I create multiple layout options and ideas with speed I’ve adopted Aaron Draplin’s approach to logo design because I feel that his methodology translates well to creating layouts.

The approach that he takes with creating logo concepts of one logo is to duplicate and retain various copies of each logo design change. If he finds that he’s going down a not so great design path, he can look back and pin-point where he went wrong and revert to a previous design. By the end of his logo design process, he has a wonderful overview of the various design iterations he made to reach the final product.

Before I adopted this method I would do multiple layouts within the one canvas and delete layouts that I didn’t quite like, which meant that they were lost throughout my development process. After a couple of hours of pixel pushing I would have not record of what I had achieved and would come out feeling pretty disheartened. Once I embraced Aaron’s method I found my process sped up and felt like I could gain a good overview of my process and ideation.

The goal for speed layouts is to do it quickly, do as many as you can and to not overthink things. At the end of it you’ll have a couple of layout examples where you can pull elements of what’s working into a final layout and drop what’s not working. Speed layouts take practice, at first you might only come up with 3 variations but after much practice that number might increase to more.

Choose the best parts and refine

After I’ve done all this I can then select the best layout design choices and go deeper to refine the overall layout. This is where I can hone in on certain areas without losing the overall messaging because I’ve already established that.

I’ll still follow the iteration method as I refine the layout, making sure not to lose a record of any changes made in case I need to revert back to a previous version.