The digital illustration system for Math content

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

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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

My role here was to ideate a system and 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.

This is what the current process looks like:

1. Receiving image request from curriculum team for new topics/pages.

2. Image creation by design team.

3. Image review by curriculum team.

   
   

Without making any changes to this sequence, we simply detailed and defined the image creation process to produce consistent, brand-relevant, math illustrations.

The idea: A Flexible Framework

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, to satisfy the following goals for the illustration system: Make it branded, scalable and web optimized.

We started with pretty simple, actionable steps to meet our goals:

• Include SplashLearn characters for delight.

• Utilize brand colour palette for instant recognition.

• Unify and define fonts and font colours for accessibility across devices.

• Define sizes and format for illustrations for fast page loading.

  
  

Goals and actions

The Final Product: A Scalable System for Future Growth

The illustration framework that allowed us to generate consistent illustrations

Our final output was broken down into three sections:

1. Creating the Smart 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 and colour guidelines, that any designer could pick up and intuitively use, regardless of prior involvement with the project.

   
   

   

   Glimpse of the Smart Library: Characters, backgrounds, containers and props

   
   

2. Creating guidelines for inhouse designers adding to the Smart Library we detailed out the illustration guidelines with an extended colour palette in order to grow our Smart Library. This helps us keep the process afloat as our vocabulary content multiplies.

   
   

   

   Preview: Guidelines for in-house illustrators

   
   

3. Creating guidelines for first time vendors composing illustrations using the Smart Library complete with size, typography, colour usage and export guidelines. This document also demonstrates step-by-step how to use the Smart Library to compose an illustration.

   
   

   

   Preview: Guidelines for vendors

How it's going so far

Setting up this system, which has been a combination of an illustration framework, a smart library, and illustration & composition guidelines has enabled us to generate 3-5 pages every week. The process, as you already must have guessed from this article so far, now also includes multiple illustrators working at different levels. Our inhouse illustrators, contributing to the Smart Library itself and vendors generating the final illustration using that very Smart Library and Framework.

The success of this project had been relatively challenging to quantify in terms of improving user experience, but one thing that we can be sure of is that we've built a robust system that supports any new universes SplashLearn wishes to open up for its learners in future- Pre-Kindergarten skills, Reading content, who knows what else is in store!