Storytelling with Data
Client: Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic
Collaborators: Flight Design Co.
• illustration • creative direction • layout • project management • design strategy •
DIscover
When I started working with Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic, author of storytelling with data: a data visualization guide for business professionals that was her first and only book. In the fall of 2018 Cole was still shaping her ideas around the final form her second book would take, and knew that she wanted to include sketch note summaries of each chapter from the first book as part of it, so that’s where my involvement began. Fast forward to the summer of 2022 and we have collaborated on two amazing books, each with their own unique journeys. A few years back I wrote about the creative process for swd: let’s practice, and so this write up focuses on the process of illustrating storytelling with you.
The discovery process for book #3 was much more straightforward than book #2 since we’d ironed out most of our process and scaled back on content / illustration needs. The biggest questions we asked during the discovery phase were “how might we design this book to both align nicely with the growing family of books, while also being distinct in it’s own ways?” and “how can we engage the reader with illustrations so they see themselves as the main character of the story?”. My lovely collaborators at Flight Design took the lead on presenting color palettes, layout options, and cover designs, while I dove deep into the world of possibilities for illustration.
Concepting
Cole came to the table with a strong creative concept and a clear structure. The book was shaping up to be three sections, with four chapters in each section. She wanted a visual table of contents that essentially mapped out the reader’s journey through the book from start to finish. We explored three possible approaches, each with distinct visual flows and storytelling devices to achieve the desired goal. As is typical, it was quite hard to choose one of the three approaches since they all had great potential, so we took pieces from two of the designs (a 2-d spatial plane and an overhead view) and took those concepts to a greater level of fidelity.
Click to expand the view of our first round of concept explorations for “Storytelling with You”
We loved the idea of some kind of map or maze, and Cole brilliantly drew connections to the idea of a game board. Early image research on this concept quickly surfaced a few of the challenges we would need to solve and decisions we would need to address in order for this to work. Mainly, we needed to sort out a flow path across a two page spread that centered the reader themselves in some form. We played with illustrations of bodies as well as an overhead view of hands working on tasks that aligned with the content of each chapter.
Image Research collage of game boards for inspiration
Round two concepts provided ideas for many of the layout and illustration decisions we needed to make before moving into refinement
Develop & Deliver
After noodling on the options presented, Cole came back with a solve for a pesky problem we were stuck on that involved the use of a full two page spread that would disrupt and potentially confuse readers. Let’s just make this visual table of contents a single page! With this new format, we were able to move into the more minor design focal points and illustration style choices.
layout options for the visual table of contents
two illustration styles presented during the third and final design review
Once we landed on an illustration style and layout, I completed the remaining illustrations and we refined for another couple of rounds until they were just right.
Final visual table of contents included in storytelling with you
Dream
Cole’s creative team took the illustrations for each chapter and ran with them for a lovely set of additional products to package in with the book. It was such a fun day when I received my book with a bookmark, sticker sheet, and greeting card with my illustrations on them! We spent a lot of time considering the best way to style and execute on these illustrations so that they could be applied in contexts beyond the book and print materials.
A chapter opening illustration in the final book, with the application of this and other illustration on a bookmark, a sticker sheet, and greeting card