‘A high street hardware store is developing a series of instructional guides to help their customers with some basic DIY skills. The client wants them to be accessible and easy to use for a non-specialist audience – so, for example, they mustn’t be too visually cluttered.
Develop a step-by-step guide for a DIY task you’re familiar with, such as preparing and painting walls, measuring and replacing soft furnishings, or putting together flat-pack furniture. Your guide can be based in the home or garden and should describe the activity from start to finish.’
Its BBQ season! The weather is gorgeous at the moment, and the BBQ is being wheeled out at least once a week. There was only one place I was going to take this task!
There was also only one obvious place for me to start and draw inspiration from – a certain Swedish furniture powerhouse…
A step-by-step guide, in my eyes should be as simple and easy to follow as possible. Meaning I think a lack of colour palette, and major detail is essential in order for the user’s attention not to be distracted from the task at hand.
Again, as with the last task, my first port of call was to begin to illustrate the BBQ on Adobe Illustrator, again keeping the individual components separate so as to demonstrate the order in which they go together.
Using our own BBQ at home as a starting point for the drawings, I studied how it went together, and to my surprise was a lot simpler than I first imagined!
Again I feel that the use of arrows really makes the focus easy to understand, whilst using cropped sections of the main image highlights exactly what section you are working on and how those components go together.
Jon Lawrence Learning Log 