The first thing I had to do was figure out what sort of resource I wanted to design. Would it be an illustration? A flowchart? A guide? To figure this out, I read the draft version of the article. From this, I surmised that a practical “how to conduct serious illness conversation” guide would be the most useful type of resource that could supplement this article. 

Of course, I don’t have a medical background, so I couldn’t trust my judgement alone. I brainstormed my idea with my supervisor, and sought feedback with the person in charge of the TCMP site. They approved my concept and highlighted chunks of info from their article they thought should be presented within the resource.

Then, it was time to figure out how I wanted all the information to be arranged. I decided this guide should be split into several clear steps, resembling a dialogue a health-care provider is having with a patient and a member of their family. Interspersed within these instructions should be example quotes the readers can utilize as conversation starters.

I created very bare-bones wireframes in Figma as a means of communicating my idea to the stakeholders in this project. The author approved the idea, and began to pick out specific quotes and pieces of information from their article to use in my resource.

After figuring out the rough layout of my resource, I worked on the illustration that would be the focal point of this document. Although it was only decorative, I thought it was important to have a point of visual interest so readers would have a break from all the text in the resource. I sketched, inked, and coloured this illustration in Procreate, being sure to implement UBC CPD brand colours to best match the theming of the site.

After receiving the finalized text from the author and finishing the illustration, it was finally time to lay everything out. I filled the final content in my wireframes. While the layout and styling of the resource looked good to me, this is where I ran into issues due to the sheer volume of text that I had to fit into my design.

Challenge: size and layout with regards to the amount of information

In a perfect world, the amount of text in this resource would fit perfectly within the design I had in mind. In reality, there were far more essential words than I anticipated. So much that it almost encompassed the entire article. Firstly, at my request, the author cut down as much of the resource text as they could, but it was still far too much text for the letter-sized frame I wanted all this information to settle in! So, I then tried making the size of the resource larger to fit all the information provided to me. This seemed to work well as a graphic, but would pose problems if readers of the article wished to print this guide out to use on the job. With any standard print size I tried to design this resource for, the text was far too small to comfortably read. Hitting a dead end with finding a good paper size I could use, I came up with a more creative way to have the resource print in a proper size. While the amount of text I had would not reasonably fit one letter-sized sheet, it could certainly fit two! With that decided, I re-designed the layout of the resource to be able to split nicely on two pages.

After solving my issue, I finally styled the text and boxes according to UBC CPD’s style guidelines. I also made sure to well-differentiate instructional text vs quotes by use of colour and font, so readers could easily pick out the quotes to use while they’re having conversations with patients With all that done, this resource was finally complete.