Patient Communication Illustrations

While patient-physician communication has always been an important aspect of treatment, the pandemic made it even more vital that patients be able to communicate their symptoms and lifestyles to their physicians. LiteraSeed is a start-up that recognized the importance of this especially in the Phoenix area, where many residents speak little to no English. They designed an app that could be used in all doctors’ offices to visually communicate patients’ symptoms, lifestyles, medical history, and presence of sick or at-risk family members. Edith March (check her out at www.marchingvisuals.com) and I were commissioned to create 53 illustrations for this app.

In creating these images, not only did we learn about the details of COVID-19 testing, but also troubleshot through the workflow of two illustrators working together on a project. Creating images that were culturally relevant was also a big part of this project, as much of the graphic imagery Edith and I had grown up with did not fit the culture of our target audience. By testing our illustrations with the target audience and iterating on the design, we were able to create imagery that worked!

We were also careful when choosing the gender of the person that we created. We chose to depict a male with androgynous features because in our target audience, it would be more likely for females to be willing to identify with a male character than for males to identify with a female character. While we didn’t want to perpetuate the patriarchy, we also wanted to ensure that the app served its purpose in making the users feel comfortable communicating their personal information.