Digital & Technical Illustrations

Adobe Illustrator was one of the first graphics program I learned. Think I started using it with Adobe Illustrator version 3.0. My first career use of it was with a lawn and garden tool manufacturer.

Our customers included many national big box store chains as well as other smaller retail outlets and distributors. Most required a digital file or representation of a supplier's product set, called a plan-o-gram (POG), was used for internal store corporate and employee reference.

Software programs had been developed that could take a package's dimensional inputs and output a representation of a supplier's product line laid out in a given amount of space. While it was fairly accurate and, more importantly, met the vendor's requirements, the outputs were simple, single-color, line drawings with oddly sized and placed dimensional references. And they worked great with rectangle, square and even oval and circles. Our product line of oddly shaped shovels, leaf rakes and cultivators, however, resulted in our plan-o-grams looking like stick figures drawn by a 4-year-old (albeit, with the manual dexterity to draw amazingly straight lines)

Our company worked with a design studio prior to my arrival and they created a digitally illustrated plan-o-gram within Adobe Illustrator^® as an alternative. It was much better, with coordinated colors and more recognizable shapes. Maybe a touch less accurate, but much more presentation-worthy.

Company hired me into the sales and marketing department just as I'd finished my Illustrator class in my technology. Presentations were big here with some PowerPoint's over 200 slides long. Transitioning between the shipping department and helping sales and marketing with trade show and presentation activities, I'd began to develop my own plan-o-gram images. These were highly accurate digital representations of the products as they would on the shelf.

These digitally illustrated plan-o-grams eventually worked their way into our presentations. I worked in 3-dimensional representations of the customer's shelf racking system and later included signage concepts and prototype endcap displayers.

I've had numerous opportunities to utilize digital illustrations in a wide variety of marketing projects, including, labels, packaging, videos, instruction manuals, birth announcements, websites, and more.