In my quest to make my craft more efficient, I discovered isometric projection, which almost immediately became a hallmark of my work.
During the first decade of the 2000s, I worked as an illustrator and infographic designer for various general interest, science, and technology magazines. The first magazine I worked for was Popular Mechanics.
The workload could vary, but generally, I had three to five collaborations per month. It took me a week to deliver each one, so I spent the whole month thinking about how to solve a problem with an illustration or infographic.
There was definitely a lot to do.
That's why, from then on, I became obsessed with finding ways to make my work more efficient. Vectors were very useful for this, but there had to be a way to simplify, systematize, and save energy in the creation of vector figures.
My early illustrations didn't follow a set grid; each one had its own perspective, with two or even three vanishing points. The problem with these illustrations was that they could hardly be reused in the same or other projects.
I started using the isometric grid in mid-2005, mainly to explore this style of illustration that I had always enjoyed. I soon discovered that it allowed me to create elements with a uniform structure and reuse them repeatedly.
An example: the following illustration of a key, I made starting from a vanishing point.
Pretty, isn't it? But it has a problem: if I wanted to reuse the outline of this key in the same project, well… it doesn't look so good anymore.
To correct this defect, a second key would have to be drawn from the vanishing point of the first one; that is, as many keys as necessary would have to be drawn again with a common vanishing point.
Similarly, if I wanted to reuse the key's outline in a new project, it would have to have the exact same vanishing point, located in the same position as the key used previously. In other words, the new work would have to fit a framing and perspective determined randomly in a previous, unrelated piece.
That doesn't make sense, so in order for the key to fit I would have to draw it from the perspective of the new project, completely ruling out the possibility of reusing the outline of the first key.
However, if the same key had no perspective and was drawn on an isometric grid like the following:
Then we could reuse the same stroke as many times as we wanted in the same project or in other contexts, as long as these were also drawn on an isometric grid. I would certainly make minor adjustments, but it would take much less time and effort than repeatedly drawing the key from scratch.
Over time, I refined and perfected my technique for working on my illustrations in an isometric space until I systematized the different processes I use to draw and generate figures, to the point that, for years, isometric projection has become a hallmark of my work.
What do you think? Has a process improvement ever impacted your work style?
