Digital Art in online education

visual design for amplify science

Upon arrival in 2022 joining the Science production team, I was tasked with a team of designers and illustrators to build an art style guide for print and digital lessons that supported Texas standards. I dove into competitor analysis, scoping science print and digital educational materials from notable companies, collecting visual data to present to our larger design group, where we were able to dream of what our own science product might be. We talked through iterations of color palettes, banner styles, cover arts, illustration styles collaged together in slide decks, drawing inspiration from the excitement of color in our natural world. The Texas science adoption got dropped end of the year, however I savored a few concepts that were presented during pre-production and planning—emphasizing gradients, pattern, supergraphics, and whimsical scale.

K-12 amplify math art direction & visual design

2022–23

As Amplify Math was integrating with Desmos, we began to utilize a web tool dubbed the Desmos graphing calculator. Amplify merged as K-12 Amplify Desmos Math (ADM), where we collaboratively explored and reimagined old Desmos math lesson art, redesigning, drafting and reviewing iterations of existing work—brainstorming what kind of overall style enhancements would be adaptable in various use cases across the learning experience.

The K-12 ADM product needed to align with the existing print product with student and teacher editions. However, through exploration, many art assets used within the print product did not meet the screen accessibility standards. We worked with our parallel team of digital designers that focuses on the UX/UI of Desmos lessons to establish a 3:1 screen contrast ratio between art objects on screen. I initially aimed to be ambitious with a playfully bright color palette, our newly and loosely established style guide, which defined shape, perspective, and the uses of strokes.

K-5 math art direction

2023–24

After massaging over art styles and the National production timeline was defined, I settled into the K-5 Math digital production team with five illustrators: Emily Hendricks, Mallory Clinger, Dillon Carson, Daniel Mok, and Jagriti Khirwar.

We completed the National beta product scoped for 2026 publication and adoption by end of 2023, which led us through enriching exploration for what the Amplify Desmos Math team hoped the full commercial product to be.

While art directing a team of five illustrators, other managerial and production tasks take up my day-to-day activities. Working closely with the digital art produced for digital lessons, my main priority was to ensure visual alignment across the landing lesson pages that the student and teach user experience. My second priority is to ensure my illustration team sustained their creative individuality within their work. The main element to visual alignment across a diverse set of illustration styles is to mimic its foundations—color, shape, and perspective.

My focus for K-5 digital art was about adaptability and fundamental art philosophies. I established some foundational goals with our visual language—clear and definitive shapes that are scalable in perspectives that suit the math context, a color palette that is adaptable to create an array of compositions, and sufficient contrast between focused primary objects and secondary background objects, whether by color or stroke details. I initiated an internal open source library for production teams across Amplify that helped solidify the K-5 digital art visual language called the Global Art Library.

The Global Art Library serves as placeholder art or stock art that can be easily manipulated by anyone who can work a Figma file. Most importantly, this library displays clear samples of what objects may look like derived by our K-5 digital art style guide.

Illustrators worked independently within their teams mixed of developers, designers, editorial and content writers to create an enhanced and inspiring digital learning experience alongside the print products.

Designing, organizing, and leading an art team within multiple team environments, adapting to multiple communication and workflow styles, and maintaining creative passion independently is complex to juggle, yet has demonstrated how far a simple vision with foundational art philosophies can gain momentum to visually support an explorative and inviting environment for students to learn in this digital sphere.