For an article by Antonio Regalado, I collaborated with artist Cherie Sinnen to illustrate a case study from Nathan Lewis’ lab at the California Institute of Technology: artificial leaves composed of silicon nanowires.
The goal was to invite the reader in with a warm and welcoming aesthetic, keep them engaged with some basic primer information about photosynthesis that would likely feel a bit familiar, then have the reader build on that more familiar content by showing how the new technology works.
In an effort to make the parallels as explicit as possible, I started by drawing out the steps using the same composition for each scenario—natural photosynthesis at the top, and artificial at the bottom. Then I used color to help highlight similarities. But stacking things meant that the reader’s eye would have to bounce from top to bottom, searching for the corresponding steps. So I pulled things apart, and put them next to each other, leaving room for explanatory text in between.
This approach is probably not the best solution for a research paper. But for a consumer magazine with a generalist audience, we had the freedom to go a bit playful with the rendering style (making Cherie Sinnen a great match for the final drawing), and a responsibility to provide the information that a generalist reader needs (a photosynthesis primer) in order to really understand the new science being presented.
