The digital illustration system for Math content

How we scaled up the SEO content creation by three times using an illustration framework.

The problem statement

Once SEO has done its job and the reader has reached your webpage, the task begins. In our case, these were a collection of math articles that cover the Common Core Curriculum, no different from what a reader could find anywhere else on the internet.

Our primary goal was to turn these verbose math topics into an engaging read by replacing textbook illustrations with exciting graphics.

Executing this across hundreds of SEO-based math articles required more than just a few illustrations—it required a scalable system. As the lead for this project, I guided the primary graphic designer through creating an efficient framework that would allow any illustrator to quickly compose visuals that seamlessly fit our brand and yet satisfy the learning needs.

My Role

Having a process in place where we could successfully produce hundreds of blog posts every month, created by vastly different creators, in-house or outsourced, and ensuring that they all are aligned in terms of visual language.

The process included:

Creation of the guidelines for newly onboarded illustrators - led by design
Hiring illustrators - led by design
Conveying requirements - led by curriculum
Approving blog illustrations - shared responsibility of design and curriculum
Uploading blogs - led by content team

The idea: A Flexible and Inclusive Toolkit

We looked at how we currently receive requirements from the curriculum team. The articles are specific to a math skill and the illustration is a digital/pencil sketch or a shutterstock image of the closest idea.

The designer starts from this reference point and recreates the image digitally as per their understanding of the brand palette.

We worked our way backwards from here, this is how we wanted to change the illustrations to make them engaging and brand-relevant:

Include SplashLearn characters for delight.
Utilize brand colour palette for instant recognition.
Unify and define fonts and font colours for accessibility across devices.
Define standard size and format for illustrations for fast page loading.

The Final Product: A Scalable System for Future Growth

The final output was broken down into two:

Creating an asset library that vendors could use to generate blog illustrations.The primary graphic designer for this project, extended the brand colour palette and visual style to create a illustration library populated with assets, that any designer could pick up and intuitively use, regardless of prior involvement with the project.
Creating the guideline for first time vendors (outsourced illustrators) on how to use the asset library to compose an illustration.