Illustration

Living On Purpose: Book Illustrations

Emily created illustrations for Amy Wong’s book, Living On Purpose: Five Deliberate Choices to Realize Fulfillment and Joy

Design Lead

Emily Mills

 

Client

Amy Wong

About the Client

Amy is a certified Executive Coach and uses her expertise in transpersonal psychology, design thinking, interpersonal neurobiology, and Conversational Intelligence®. Amy has provided thousands of transformative experiences for individuals, executives, teams, and organizations.

About the project

Amy wrote Living On Purpose as the guidebook for people asking themselves “Is this the life I was meant to live?” It solves the pervasive feeling of lack and dissatisfaction that we can’t figure out how to fix. It fills the hole that can’t be achieved by more stuff—more money, more status, or the next big thing.

Process

Amy had a few illustration ideas but needed my help to bring clarity. We had a call to discuss her main illustration for the book, the Living on Purpose Map. Amy gave me a rough drawing and I listened to her as she explained her goals, preferred style, and reader persona.

I worked to interpret Amy’s needs into illustrations that are clear, impactful, and fully communicate the message.

Map Illustration

Amy gave me a rough sketch of her Living on Purpose Map, an illustration that was central to the book and would be referenced in each chapter. It was essential that this map be clear! To make sure this would be accomplished, I made a few adjustments:

 

  • The character would approach from the left side of the page instead of the right to give feeling of forward movement, since we read left to right.
  • The character was originally a woman modeled after the reader persona, but we decided to simplify it to a genderless character to be more accessible for all readers, not just the intended audience.
  • As the map took shape in its new form, Amy also gained clarity and made changes to the map contents.
  • I had to keep in mind that the map would be split down the middle when printed. I made sure nothing vital was in the middle of the map.

Amy’s original sketch for the Map

Final version of the Map

My first rough draft of the Map

Map in the book

Let’s work together.