A friend recently asked me for tips on illustrating. He’s writing content for a specific topic, and wants to include visuals to explain the ideas.
A few tips I suggested to him:
1. Just start sketching – If you can draw a stick figure with arrows and labels, you can use those to illustrate an idea. Messy is fine. In fact its encouraged. Don’t try to be perfect, just sketch out an idea, show it to a few friends for feedback and ship it. I like to sketch with an iPad + Apple Pencil in Freeform, but all you need to start is a napkin and pen. Draw out that idea and show it to a friend.
2. Worry about style later – Right now your focus should be on conveying your idea. If you write a thousand word article and want to include an illustration alongside it, that illustrations goal is to help summarize some key point of the article. Don’t worry about if it’s not perfect. In fact, A List Apart made a game of its illustrations being incredibly abstract and not really on point with the article. They’re amazing.
3. Copy the masters – When you’re ready to figure out your style, spend time straight up copying illustrations that you like. This is entirely optional and only if you want to to get closer to a specific style you love. In college my professor encouraged us to trace out drawings from Leonardo Da Vinci or Michaelangelo, copying stroke by stroke to understand they did things. For me it was a lot of fun to start to figure out what type of lines I wanted to create, what types of shading I wanted, etc.
4. Iterate on the fly – Your first sketch will be messy, at least I hope so. If it feels too perfect you probably spent too much time on it. Just doodle out an idea and ship it, then move on. You’ll improve on future sketches, not this one.
For inspiration I recommend looking at some of the visuals from Ben Thompson, the beautifully simple and elegant drawings of from Randall, and consider grabbing The Shape of Ideas by Grant Snider.
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Above all else, you’ve got this. You don’t have to be an artist to convey an idea. In fact I did a whole talk on this years ago. Just sketch out your idea and ship it, learn from it, ask others if they understood it, and keep tweaking in future iterations, not in the current one.
Also, if you’re tempted to use AI I’d say go for it, try it out, see if you like it. The challenge I’ve seen with AI is that it takes the median of all ideas and creates a rather generic concept. That may be useful if you don’t trust your skills at all. But I’d suggest that the time spent flexing your drawing muscle may in fact help with your writing.
Thank you to Arlen for the inspiration to write this.