Client Work: Who’s Reading Science Blogs?

Who’s Reading Science Blogs?

This was an amazing project to work on with Researcher and Science Communicator Dr. Paige Jarreau of Louisiana State University. Her research with Dr. Lance Porter, funded on Experiment.com, had some budget left over after the results were in. Paige hired me to create a fun infographic to make the research more accessible to the viewer. She would be able to use it on social media and on her blog, From the Lab Bench, to share the results of her study with the public.

One of the challenges was… how do you make an individual generic enough but also interesting?? It became obvious to us that we could not use a human shape, because… yeah, let’s just not go there. From the world of birding, the epitome of generic is the “little brown jobby” and so I drew inspiration (pun intended) from the shape and colouring of a female towhee. Then I decided to go with a small owl (a Saw Whet Owl) to represent the researchers and academia. Using pen and watercolour, I created the drawings and then composited them together and cleaned everything up using Adobe Photoshop. I added the text using Adobe InDesign, and Paige and I co-edited the text used in the illustration to make sure that it would all fit the layout but still express the original intended message.

I was also able to give Paige each component of the illustration separately, so she could use them in her blog and in a slideshow when she speaks publicly about her research.

This was a super-fun project, and Paige was delightful to collaborate with. I would absolutely love to work with her again.