BIOCAD is a biotechnology company that specializes in the research, development, production, and distribution of pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical products. The company employs over 2,200 people, of which about 40% are scientists and researchers. My task was to design the cover for the company's branded diary, which will be a New Year 2023 gift for the company's partners and employees, with a print run of several thousand copies.
Images are shown for informational purposes only.
This is an unusual blog format for me where I describe the steps of my work. Yesterday, I found a website for creating a slider script completely by chance, which can be embedded in a Behance presentation. Below, you will see sliders that nicely allow you to switch to the Before-After mode. During communication with the customer, I usually discuss all the color, style, and element preferences, and if I'm lucky, I can get an idea for an illustration from the conversation. Usually, a few simple sketches are enough to continue the work.
In my work, I like to combine images in an interesting way, like in this case: the Petri dish is a piece of equipment used to grow colonies of bacteria on its surface. Samples are applied to the surface of the dish and placed in an appropriate environment for replication. After a week, sometimes bizarre patterns of bacteria or fungi grow on the dish. In this way, I combined the image of the Petri dish with the image of the moon. The microscope on which the lab technicians are standing is an image of a high-tech telescope. The four figures represent the four spheres of the company's activities: research, testing, marketing, and another sphere that I have already forgotten. The female laboratory technician with a mouse in a cage is of course about testing.
I made a simple sketch, based on the customer's requirements I created a color table according to the brand book, these colors should be followed in a 70%, 20%, and 10% ratio respectively. For clarity and ease of work, I divided them into three columns. And in the work I paid careful attention to these proportions (it was not necessary later)
As you can see on the left, I drew an illustration according to the brand book colors and their quantitative relationship. The customer liked my illustration in general, but there were comments on the details. They wanted to remove the DNA spirals and a few other elements whose names I don't remember anymore. But what surprised me the most was the customer's desire "this time to depart from the corporate colors, make the gradients more complex, and add depth and atmosphere." This means that the work I did at the beginning was not needed. Nevertheless, we continued...
In the right part is the same version that, as I believed, met the customer's wishes. That is, it was complex, deep, and atmospheric enough. According to the customer, it is too bright and they also want to blur the Petri dish on the background.
f i n a l v e r s i o n
I reduced the color contrast and added more noisy textures. I replaced the details at the bottom left, added strange flying hooks that mean something in their scientific field, something related to genetics. I like to add funny little things to my pictures, which unfortunately are not always accepted by the customer. In the initial version, the green liquid in the test tube in the hands of the lab assistant was angled, which in the opinion of the company managers does not correspond to the physics of the world, the force of gravity attracts liquids strictly horizontally :) I tried to explain this property as if we were rotating the test tube in a circle in our hand, mixing the contents, at some point the liquid in the test tube would be at such an angle. This little thing seemed interesting to me, but unfortunately the managers were stronger in arguments:)
And oh, by the way... the mouse is no longer a prisoner of the cage, now it peacefully sits on the palm of the female researcher.
Images are shown for informational purposes only.
